Athos Bulcão: atelier artworks

“I have some works that
are very musical; they seem to have rhythm. I like to paint leaving one color
behind another, creating something a little mysterious. (…)

Portinari taught a lot,
he helped me to understand paintings, to analyze how they were made. European
art is all very thought out. Someone may argue, 'And Van Gogh?' Van Gogh was
very decisive to make his paintings the way he did, with only three, four or
five colors. And this is something technical, which helps the painter. Before making
a painting, I choose the colors I will use, rarely adding one more. The thing
is all painted beforehand.” (interview given by the artist to the newspaper
Jornal de Brasília, published July 2, 1998.)

His drawing
technique, traces and themes, spaces and fullness, all that constitutes the
basic vocabulary of his graphic language is used here to give life to a
reinvented space, a surprising vision of a fantastic and perturbing interior
world. It is as if everything had emerged from a (conscious) environment of
forms from an internal sea whose unfathomable topology contained unconscious
contents and meanings, innumerable and latent life systems waiting to
incarnate. If it were possible to give a general name to these drawings, I
would like to call them ‘apparitions’. (Ítalo
Campofiorito, Presentation of the individual exposition: Drawings Encontro Art
Gallery, Brasilia, 1968)

When getting away (always with many possibilities of
reappearance) of his schematic figures, he experiences a certain floating
geometry in large color spaces, in his masks, from 1970 onwards, transferred the
polychrome fixtures for the screen, and that will follow for the rest of his
life. He starts the definition of quadrangular camps released in a fund that is
always dark, populated by organic shapes, often evocative in a cameo. At first,
arranged at right angles, they also float, creating overlays and
transparencies. (Marilia Panitz, The imaginary according to Athos Bulcão, 100
Years of Athos Bulcão, 2018)

“The idea emerged at the last moment of the film,
2001: A Space Odyssey, with the fetus. And they are fetuses; they are
locked inside the uterus; I imagine that it is a question about biological
origin. (…) The intention is to
make an object, play with the anthropology, with the physical origin. I was in
Paris in 1971 at the Musée de l’Homme (…) I thought about doing an exhibition
with masks that seemed like they were made of strange materials. The
exhibition was called É Tudo Falso (It Is All False), playing with the question
of the work of art. The work of art is an illusion. First, this is because it
does not serve for absolutely anything, which is the fascinating part. Then, how can one say when a work of art is true or
when it is false?” (interview given by
the artist to the newspaper Jornal de Brasília, published July 2, 1998.)