Centrifugation by Beate Reifenscheid

José Bechara is one of the most interesting artists on the Brazilian contemporary art scene. He began his career as a painter, with a radically reduced form of language, committed, even today, to concrete art in the broadest sense of the word. It is his profound notion and understanding of the constructive structures that form the internal skeleton of his paintings, which modulate colors in a type of floating, unlimited space.
Using square figures with arrangements and grids of rigid lines, his paintings oscillate between the concreteness of shapes and structures and the inconcreteness of space. Together, these elements resemble the movement of a pendulum, between free abstract brushstrokes, colorful paint and geometric shapes, which, in turn, look like different layers within this space. However, it is also clear that the artist's focus is always on penetrating space and understanding its dimensions in perception. The concrete and the non-concrete are based directly on the level of possible perspectives.
Some of the geometric shapes are exposed in Bechara's sculptures, in their repeated square shapes, which also play with the concept of series structures. With their random opening and mobility, they offer every possibility of being adjusted to the chosen spaces. This adjustment to any type of space is a conceptual idea aimed directly at the spectator or collector, who are called upon to “use” the sculpture for their own purposes. Everything that is changed by the viewer is part of the concept, which just revolves around this idea of space, which consists of several structural grids – visible and invisible.
Bechara's new glass works are therefore a logical continuation of his previous work and even more conceptual. Grounded in the solid materiality of glass, they are both a factual element and, thus, a barrier in the continuous spectrum of space, and an apparently invisible fact, which does not create any barrier between the viewer and the space. They are, therefore, a contradiction in themselves, questioned only by the various items that Bechara combines with the glass plates, such as a red grille, a silver head (self-portrait of the artist) or small wrapped and colorful packages. Sometimes, several layers of glass sheets form a geometric structure and an object at the same time, which not only makes the transparency visible, but also reflects the solidity of the square shapes. In contemporary art, glass is a newly explored material and famous artists such as Pierre Soulages, Gerhard Richter and Ai Weiwei have experimented with it. José Bechara's glass works highlight the conceptual perception of Brazilian constructivism and transfer it to a contemporary approach.

Prof. Dr. Beate Reifenscheid
Director of the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany.
Text written for the exhibition Fluxo Bruto, by José Bechara, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2017.