LONDON — Artistic geography is an understudied subject, but an important one. When a style is transported to a new terrain, climatically and/or culturally, it is likely to undergo a change. Thus, as is demonstrated by “Radical Geometry,” an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (through September 28), much abstract South American art of the post-war era had its roots in pre-war Europe. But, having crossed the Atlantic and traveled south of the Equator, the sober geometry of the Bauhaus and De Stijl was transformed into something very different: more sensuously physical, more mobile, more bizarre.
One is tempted to resort to a stereotype: could this work be the cool and rhythmic visual equivalent of Samba, Tango, and Bossa Nova? Perhaps it has something to do with the dynamic mood of the new world. After all, that affected even the serious-minded Dutchman Piet Mondrian himself, after he moved to the US in the last years of his life. Looking at a painting such as “Composition,” 1953, by the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, you realize that her starting point was not the harmonious yet static Mondrian of the 1920s and ’30s, but rather later work such as his “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” 1942-3, which seems to pulse with the energy of Manhattan traffic as well as that of blues piano.
The best of South American abstraction was like that. As you walk around the exhibition, you can see the squares and circles of the Old World styles begin to move and bounce. And as they do, novel idioms emerge: kinetic art and Op art. The work of the Brazilian Hermelindo Fiaminghi from the later ’50s is already more than half way to Op, for example. His “Alternated 2,” 1957, consisted of intersecting red and grey spindle-like shapes resembling the teeth of a comb. The resulting image shimmers and fizzes like a Bridget Riley from a few years later.
South American art tends to embrace paradoxes. “Nylon Cube,” 1990, by the Venezuelan Jesús Soto, consists of a rectangular arrangement of dangling plastic fronds. It is both transparent and geometric, softly permeable and as rigidly square-edged as any Mondrian — a seductively beautiful and intriguingly unclassifiable object. Like quite a few pieces of South American art of the period, it seems to be edging from being a sculpture or painting towards being something more all-embracing: an environment.
You can see how the work of a contemporary South American artist such as the Brazilian Erneto Neto — which tends towards softly encompassing, dangling, and wearable art — comes out of some of the pieces on show. The short-lived but significant influence of Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), for example — a fellow Brazilian and reference-point for Neto — evolved from geometrical abstraction to such novelties as his “Parangolés,” soft art in the form of costumes to be worn by Samba dancers. That is, art that needed to be activated by human movement. Lygia Clark made a similar move in another way with her series of “Creatures,” hinged metal sculptures that can be reconfigured in many diverse ways.
The last two examples bring one up against the limits of exhibitions. Clark’s “Creatures” don’t mean much unless you can pick them up and move them around, Oiticica’s “Parangolés” need a person gyrating inside. There is another limitation: this show, though beguiling, is housed in the small-scale Sackler Galleries (and all derived from one source, the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros). The most impressive of these South American works, however, are often imposingly large.
I remember an astonishing piece by the Brazilian Lygia Pape filling the first space in the Arsenale at the 2009 Venice Biennale — it consisted of filaments of golden wire gleaming in a darkened room like diagonal shafts of light, at once minimalist, baroque, and visionary. One aspect of this movement, particularly in Brazil and Venezuela, was that it linked with the architecture of the period by the great Oscar Niemeyer — creator of Brasília, among others.
As Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro points out in a catalogue essay, the 1940s and ’50s were a time of optimism and expansion in South America. European Modernism ran into the disasters of totalitarianism and the Second World War, but neither had much impact of the other side of the ocean.
You only get a sense of the larger-scale possibilities of South American art at a couple of points in the RA show: Soto’s “Nylon Cube” is one; another is the wall-sized “Physiochromie No 500,” 1970, by Carlos Cruz-Diez — a painting that positively demands the viewer to move. As you walk past it, a ripple of transformation runs along the surface, which is made up of strips differently colored on different sides.
“Radical Geometry” is an appetizer rather than a full survey of a big subject that is still not well-known in Europe, certainly in London. Despite that limitation, it’s a delightful little exhibition.
