Modernidade no Jardim: síntese ou dialética das artes? Artepaisagem em Roberto Burle Marx e Waldemar Cordeiro

Modernity in the garden: synthesis or dialectics of the arts? Art and landscape in Roberto Burle Marx and Waldemar Cordeiro The presumed fatality of our modern destiny, reiterated by historiography since the intervention of Mário Pedrosa in 1959 Congresso Internacional Extraordinário de Críticos de Arte, not always comes along with its essential counterpart, combining the nation historical insufficiency, our lack of tradition, to the inconsistency of the territory occupation and the landscape incipience, aspects that give rise to a call for planning in conjunction with the calling of arts, whose synthesis was seen as the only possible way to restore the artist social and cultural dimensions. If the notion of synthesis of the arts would locally endorse the establishment of landscape design as a discipline, their development fostered a new sensibility – a new vision of the landscape, assigned by Flávio Motta to Roberto Burle Marx –, emerged from the confluence of humanism, the scientific naturalism of the Renaissance, the experience of the virgin forest, the plastic and chromatic autonomy achieved by the modern art. But what distinguishes the scientific thought is precisely the detachment of the empirical gaze sensitivity. A strict association between artistic modernity and naturalistic scientism sounds therefore out. The modern encounter between art and science allows many forms of intellection of the visible, to which there are different ways to contribute to the cultural construction of the town and the country, to think the insertion of the humanistic project in the society. The paper presents the landscape design of Waldemar Cordeiro, exponent of art concrete, as exemplary in all possible senses due to the idea of figuration of the country. The notion of landscape, in this approach, call forth the theoretical substratum of Alain Roger and his concept of artialização [artialisation], putting it in motion to emphasize a dialectic of the arts that, in accord with the ideological assumptions of Cordeiro, seeks not the elimination of contradictions, but his incitation, towards the formation of a cultural landscape.