White devours all colors. "White is tamed light: the dynamic of our contemplation," defined the poet Murilo Mendes.1 "If art has known harmony, rhythm, beauty, it has known zero," is in Malevitch's "Suprematist mirror" (1923).2 Art, like philosophy and science, will develop its own method. Jorge Romero Brest analyses the first Bienal de São Paulo: "the term proportion, the term mathematics, the term precision, [. . .] lead to error, for it is not about artistic forms on which mathematical principles are applied, but about obtaining, through fantasy and intuition, forms that in the aesthetic plan possess similar characteristics."3 The dialogue produced for Brazilian art by the Bienal de São Paulo is designated as the "Bienal effect." Here it is relevant to quote Arp, Vordemberge-Gildewart, Albers, Bill and Lohse. In the anteroom of the Monochromes exhibition are included artists who were a fundamental reference to the constructive project in Latin America: Malevitch, Mondrian, van Doesburg, Vantongerloo. Despite the correlations with the Baroque, the Latin American constructive vanguards did not discard a certain historicism and essentialism, as in De Stijl.4 They resorted to the utopian grounds of the Bauhaus, of the Russian vanguards, to neoplasticism and Torres-García, which shows that our North is the South to recompose the sense of orientation. The monochrome prompts a discussion on the constitutive process of the autonomy of cultures from peripheral regions in the face of the eurocentric process. Whilst antropofagia projected a process of cultural emancipation, color organized an identity model in Brazil.5

Latin America abandons the understanding of art as the history of styles or images in order to extract from it problems to be developed. The notion of "influence" is no longer relevant. There no longer exist models to follow in that visual epistheme. The knowledge of art history is imperative for choosing the points of insertion and rupture in the common ground of western culture. Articulating this consciousness, the theorist of neoconcretism Ferreira Gullar discusses the death of painting in "Teoria do não-objeto" [Theory of the non-object]: "it is with Mondrian and Malevitch that the elimination of the object continues. [. . .] After all, it is painting that lies there inarticulate in search of a new structure, of a new way of being, of a new signification."6 Repeatedly Oiticica and Clark refer to neoplasticism and suprematism. It is possible to correlate Oiticica's Núcleos, an architecture of color planes with van Doesburg's architectural drawings with painted walls like monochromatic planes, moving beyond his ideas of "parallelism between pictorial form and natural form."

Bruno Duborgel discusses the unfigurable in Malevitch and suprematist etymology. Inexistent in Russian, it was forged from the Latin and from the Polish designating an ontological function: "to disclose," "to reveal," "to manifest," "to present," the Absolute as objectless, the Void, the abyssal being, the universal excitement, the "essence of diversities," the nonfigurative being, the objectless world.7 "I have metamorphosed myself in zero forms," said Malevitch.8 In the economy of modernity, the white monochrome is the essential and, at the same time, all colors. Concerning his suprematist work, Malevitch adds: "The free white abyss, infinity are before us."9 Yet Arp's painted bas-relief Expressive forms (1932) shows the modern hybrid between painting and sculpture.10 Robert Rauschenberg explains the genesis of structural simplicity of his White paintings (1951): whilst Albers pointed out the equivalence of colors, he hesitated in their arbitrary choice. One of the reasons for his White paintings was not to employ color at his personal service.11

The monochrome here is an extraordinary paradigm. The singularity emerges as extreme precisely where there would seem to have been the greatest similitude. Commenting on the monochromatic inventions of Yves Klein, Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly, Benjamin Buchloch observed how "the coincidence as well as the simultaneity and repetitions of other avant-garde paradigms, substantiates the hypothesis that the discursive formation of modernism generated its own historical and evolutionary dynamic. If we assume that the visual paradigms operate analogously to linguistic paradigms, then the 'langue' of modernism would constitute the neo-avant-garde 'speakers' and continuously replicate and modify their 'paroles.'"12 White monochromes created in little over a decade by artists from all over the world point to the dispersion of the idea of center in art history. This occurs where there is an artist who questions the gaze, whether in Brazil, Venezuela, Italy, France, the United States or Japan.13 Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni mark Europe in the '50s. In manifesting the idea of the monochrome,14 Klein became the owner of the IKB (International Klein Blue) blue and of color itself. According to Restany, blue for Klein is "a tangible figuration of the infinite space,"15 identifying the pictorial and existential phenomenons. His methodological project aimed at the brilliancy of the materials and the intensity of "color in freedom." Ideas of color impregnation and incorporation refer us to Manzoni. His first achromes date to 1957. In order to operate the corporeality of the monochromes, Manzoni used hydrophilic materials; and also hairy and stony ones to explore the surface, declaring that "My aim is to create an entirely white surface (completely colorless, neutral) that no longer refers in any way to a phenomenon or pictorial element unfamiliar to the nature of the surface."16

Ferreira Gullar's article "Arte neoconcreta, uma contribuição brasileira" [Neoconcrete art, a Brazilian contribution],17 demarcates the genesis of this Brazilian movement and its references to Malevitch and to Mondrian's foreboding of the end of the painting.18 After the Gestalttheorie, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology splits Brazilian concretism, then caught in dogmatic objectivity, guided by the theories of Norbert Wiener, Charles Pierce, Max Bill and Swiss concrete art. Neoconcretism reestablished the indices of subjectivity, whether belonging to the artist or the spectator, for the realization of the plastic fact. In his trajectory, Hércules Barsotti explores the proportions between light and darkness. A slight movement gives way to the plastic fact when coming across brightness or light. His dedicated neoconcrete operation lies in accepting any minor action of the gaze. Branco branco [White white] announces the exact point of constitution of the nature of space: the borderline between white planes. Present there is something of Morandi and of the place between things. As luminosity emerges tension settles in and difference irrupts. This sign is the course that constitutes the birth of language. Lygia Clark's work is about the adventure of the plane. Towards the end of the '50s, the artist realized that space emerges from the articulation of independent planes,19 such as in Planos em superfície modulada n.1 [Planes in modulated surface #1] (1957). In the junction line of these wooden planes there remain breaches which the artist incorporates into the plastic discourse like an "organic line." They are veins through which run shadows and air. Air invades the white monochrome. Instead, Hélio Oiticica lives the adventure of color.20 In the neoconcrete period, Oiticica wrote, "Color, time and structure," an analysis of the sense of color, white being the "most static that favors silent, dense and metaphysic duration. The encounter of two different whites occurs deafly, one being more pure whilst the other is naturally more opaque."21 In order to counterbalance the difference, Oiticica would change the brushstroke's direction.22 He searches for the color's place, the "organic relation of shape-color," displaces the plane to become concrete space, until it turns into penetrable architecture. Color's corporeality is the path that directs the experience of art to the complete sensorial potentiality of the individuals.

Emigrating from Japan in 1958, Yayoi Kusama created the Infinity nets through pattern repetition, as in No. D (1959). Donald Judd compared such paintings to "large fragile, but vigorously carved grill or to a massive, solid lace."23 The network gives the artist a sense of control in the face of her mental illness.24 In these "quasi-monochromes," as Lynn Zelevansky designates them, white finalizes the history of the picture, superimposed on all possible and visible color nuances. White does not refute rhetoric, excess, the misleading traces of the gestural as it comes to live an unexpected crisis of reason and measure.25 The Brazilian artist born in Japan, Tomie Ohtake, covers surfaces with white (1961) like a film of light. Through it filter other pictorial layers of the painting revealing the history of color and manifesting the plurality of colors present in white. "According to Zen, the color white knows who lies distant from it," recalls Murilo Mendes. Manabu Mabe, another Japanese-Brazilian, departs from the excess in a monochrome (1962). Earlier on, Mário Pedrosa had expressed his "gluttonous love of substance."26 The transient calligraphic gesture registers the thickness of the pictorial covering like an incised body. In the field of light Mabe writes for shadows.

The neoconcrete space leads Ferreira Gullar to argue in "Teoria do não-objeto" that Fontana's canvases are "a retarded attempt at destroying the fictitious quality of the pictorial space by introducing in it a real cut."27 In the "Manifiesto Blanco" [White manifesto] (1946), Fontana defends color as a space-element for an art devoid of artifice that would involve sound, time and matter. To Murilo Mendes, Fontana's knife represents the "art of dividing the space in harmony with its internal cohesion."28 Space springs from perforating and cutting acts, violent on the color-support and arbitrary before its own logic. The blade mutilates the body29 and creates shadows on the white. Clark's Plano em superfície modulada [Plane in modulated surface] announces her slips in air and shadows. In Vibración en blanco [Vibration in white] (1960), Soto displays the logic of the support's thread and texture, in contrast to Fontana's gesturality. The artist directs the openings towards dissolution, strictly following the logic of the support's structure. Thus the support maintains its basic cohesion, despite being still fragile, in order to simultaneously disperse and retain the density of the white as well as light. In a painting (Untitled, 1964), Mira Schendel opens rectangles on the white ground. The artist manages to introduce, as a calculating device, the void where the degree zero of the gaze was established. The rectangular planes cut space like the negative planes of painting.

"White on white: Absolute white in activity," sang Murilo Mendes. Going back to oil painting, Alejandro Otero adopts the monochromatic predominance that imposed itself on the formation of color. He develops a deaf game of concealment and veiling. White becomes laconism in a plane of regression towards the utopia of the White canvas painting (1961).30 White is the experience of chords. "Color has to be structured as sound in music," expressed Oiticica.31 Robert Ryman's absolute choice for white included the offering of "an experience of delight, and well-being, and rightness. It is like listening to music,"32 to clarify the density of white. Winsor (1965), denotes the procedure of painting series and giving titles that are not associated to objects, people and places.33 It refers to the brand of paints Winsor & Newton. Ryman explores the construction of painting loading the paintbrush with paint and creating horizontal strips from left to right until the paint dries up. He repeats this procedure making a new strip below. Robert Storr compares Ryman to "Inuit who can read with precision a comparably narrow spectrum of snow and ice, Ryman has catalogued white's actual variety, thus ironically demonstrating its latent no-neutrality when seen in relation to itself."34 For Ryman, white "makes other aspects of painting visible that would not be so clear with the use of other colors."35

The white monochromes reveal the world marked by solitary differences. The monochrome is imbued with symbolic significance, introducing issues such as difference, desire, power, racism or art. This is seen in Felix Gonzalez-Torres and in André Serrano's blood photography. It is the fusion of symbols in Anish Kapoor's sculpture or prompts the dissolution of the idea of authorship in Gerhard Richter's painting. It is concept and its reification. Yves Klein restored the monochrome and other colors in the discussion of cannibalism.

Political violence compares to cannibalism. Montaigne discusses in his Essays (I, XXXI) that "us [Europeans] exceed them [the cannibal Tupinambás Indians] in all forms of barbarity." Religious wars, ethnic conflicts, civil fights, and fascism demonstrate how society itself devours its children. Glenn Ligon's painting interrogates. The work done in conjunction with Byron Kim, Black and white (version # 1) (1993), consists in a series of monochromes which explore the color-ethnicity relationship ironically, like in a commercial showcase of paints. "The work of the artists of color is often reduced to being simply about race and nothing else, as if our gender, sexual, class, and other identities didn't complicate any discussion of race as a subject matter, or as if race was our 'natural' subject matter."36 In a subtle way the artist paints black lettered texts over a black ground to discuss how the use of color names to designate ethnicities can result in racism when the discourse on ethnic identity denies the discourse of subjectivity. In support of Mandela, Nigel Rolfe created Hand on face (1988). Differences of projection-whether on a large screen in Wembley or on a small monitor-discuss social space. The anti-Malevitch video charges the image with meaning. In real time, the artist's face suffers repeated attacks by a black-painted hand. The subtext refers to the political violence of censorship, torture and individual identity closely linked to the physical condition. The individual's encounter with the plasticity of power is made evident. In the "Roteiros. . ." segment, Abdoulaye Konaté exhibits the installation Genocide, in which cutouts of a red fabric-monochromes-repair the canvas. These are wound and suture on a body that wanes in hunger and mutilates in war under the gaze mediated by the means of communication. Konaté belongs to a generation of artists who incorporate ancestral values to today's denseness. Africa acknowledges itself as critical subject of its political process. From Palestinian origin, Mona Hatoum works within the tradition of visual symbolization in Islamic culture and its representation interdict. Ornaments, arabesques, calligraphy, colors articulate meaning without representing. The abstract surface of Prayer mat (1995) is the result of thousands of safety-pins. A compass, a "kitsch" inscription, allows one to know the direction of Meca. The abstract surface of Prayer mat contrasts with Entrails carpet, a repulsive territory, and Marble carpet, whose thousands of glass balls destabilize the space. The materials' sensuality exacerbates certain territorial frailties.

In his anthropoemetrics, Yves Klein used people for printing pigments. "Appropriative urgency," says Pierre Restany,37 applying a term linked to anthropophagy to this kind of shroud. Klein printed "battles" restrained by bodies in turbulent movements-"a battle with the aura of unrestrained exuberance, orgasmic ecstasy, orgiastic chaos, and savage violence."38 In Grande antropophagie bleue-Hommage a Tennessee Williams [Great blue anthropophagy-Homage to Tennessee Williams] (1960), Klein ratifies cannibalism as a symbolic practice, a metaphor of violence and a phantasmagoric dimension in desire. Tennessee Williams had approached the theme in the book Suddenly last summer, where the character Sebastian, in search of sensory realization, ends up consumed by a gang-a brutal index of social decadence. Like Montaigne, Klein saw Europe, for its wars, as "pure 'flesh' [. . .]. We will rapidly become anthropophagites."39 Further still, he saw the Eucharist as an anthropophagic rite. Preceding the edenic "blue era," cannibalism would be the phase of man's redemption. Klein commented that "We are coming into an anthropophagous era [. . .]. It will be the peaceful realization on a universal scale of the famous words: He who eats of my flesh and drinks of my blood will live in me and I in him."40 Klein's religious ancestral cannibalism would be destiny of a last judgment.

In Project for an artistic attitude (1970), Antonio Dias inverts the writing of the word REALITY. The relationship between visual sign and verbal sign places the word in suspension on the black ground. The nonverbal space functions as an immense monochrome. Malevitch and his non-objectivity or other models of the reduction of painting and its recording in society are alluded to. Constituting the series Model of art, this work is articulated in Model of society in which The invented country/Dias-de-Deus-Dará is inscribed (1976).

In the field of contemporary thought, "art is the critical model of art," that questions society as one of its contents and, implicitly, as lack. The artist's attitude model is to create knowledge in the friction field of art/society. Departing from the fact that the monochrome is a reduction to the essential, Cildo Meireles shifts towards the excess of color in Desvio para o vermelho [Detour into red] (1967-1984).41 Impregnação [Impregnation], the installation's first setting, apparently draws Cildo closer to Yves Klein's economy. However, Cildo approaches the capital's maneuvers, the encounter between exchange value and utility value, symbolic value and real value. As an inflationary economic operation, color devours and neutralizes ideas of value. The monochrome now takes an opposite course: from the notion of zero to the recording of history.

Paulo Herkenhoff
Translated from the Portuguese by Veronica Cordeiro