Nota sobre a morte imprevista

This work was produced in the year of the Brazilian military coup of 1964 and had a substantial impact on the young artists of Antonio Dias’ generation. In 1967, Hélio Oiticica considered it essential to defining the avant-garde assembled for the group exhibition of the Nova Objetividade Brasileira [New Brazilian Objectivity], as he wrote in the catalog for the show: “The phenomenon of the destruction of the frame, or the simple denial of the limits of the easel, and the consequent process, which is to say, the successive creation of reliefs, anti-frames, spatial or environmental structures, and the formulation of objects, or rather the arriving at the object, dates from 1954 onwards…. So I consider the decisive turning point of this process in the pictorial-plastic-structural field to be the work by Antonio Dias—‘Note on unforeseen death,’ in which he suddenly posits very profound issues of an ethical-social nature and of a pictorial-structural nature, indicating a new approach to the problem of the object…. Thenceforth there arises in Brazil a true process of ‘transitions’ to the object and to dialectical-pictorial propositions…. There is no other reason for the tremendous influence of Dias over the majority of the artists that subsequently emerged.” (Hélio Oiticica, “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade,” in Escritos de artistas: anos 60/70, ed. Gloria Ferreira and Cecilia Cotrim [Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2006], 154). Translated for this volume.