Pigment pur and the Corpo da côr: post-painterly practice and transmodernity

Abstract

This article analyzes a near-contemporaneous incidence of post-painterly practice—the use of raw pigment—utilized by the French neo-avant-garde artist Yves Klein and the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica. The use of raw pigment by both artists was conditioned by a self-conscious relationship to the history of modernist art and the monochrome as a limit and origin of painting. Despite the confluence of such orientations, Klein’s Pigments purs (pure pigments) and Oiticica’s Corpo da côr (body of color) resulted in radically divergent orientations towards the industrially-produced commodity and hence the readymade. By exploiting inconsistencies characteristic of the commodity in developmentalist Brazil, Oiticica orchestrated a transfer of making from artist to viewer, initiating a newly participatory dimension within modernist color.