Concretismo, concretão, Neoconcretismo: algumas considerações e duas casas

The Concretist Movement happens in the 1950’s, in São Paulo, then an already wealthy city due to its industrialization and starting to improve its cultural role. In 1952 the Concretist group of artists announce the “Rupture” manifesto, broadcasting their ethic, aesthetic and political principles, proposing “a renovation of the essential values of visual arts”; in 1956 they associate with the Noigrandes Poets. In Rio de Janeiro the abstract-geometric tendency defines the Grupo Frente (1953); after the National Exhibition of Concrete Art (SP & RJ, 1956), cultural, political, artistic and personal divergences gave birth to the Neoconcretist dissention (1959), rejecting the Paulista’s “excessive rationalism” in pro of a “sensible rationalism”. Besides the presence of architects in the concretism movement there are other points of contact between the Paulista Concretism and the then springing Paulista Brutalism: both shared the desire to bond “ethical” and “aesthetical” paths, rejected the “natural”, “figurative”, “regional” in pro of an “abstraction” against the regional, folkloric and nationalistic ideas. In the peak of the concretism/ neoconcretism debate two houses of Vilanova Artigas (Baeta, 1956 & Mendonça, 1959) seem to establish a dialogue with the artistic, cultural and political debates of that moment, most specially, but not exclusively with the concretism.