Rio_murals
Modernist mosaics: Paulo Werneck’s legacy THE BRAZILIAN MURALIST’S SPLENDID WORKS ADORN VARIOUS BUILDINGS IN RIO
©Paul Clemence
If someone asks you to picture a Modernist building, chances are you’ll conjure vast blank walls, rigorous right angles, a color palette dulled almost into nonexistence. Architects like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier wanted to strip away what they considered the frippery of previous generations, who had disguised the “truth” of a building – its working infrastructure – behind the excrescence of non-functional columns, blind windows, meaningless tracery. Despite such severity, even purists like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier envisioned their buildings operating as blank canvases for the vivid creations of other artists. Mies, for example, suggested that certain walls be blanketed in murals. And Le Corbusier spent his mornings engaged in the highly “non-functional” practice of creating paintings and drawings. But for these demanding fellows, not any art would do. It had to be integral to the building itself – to share its structural DNA.
194 aïshti magazine
When Modernism arrived in Rio de Janeiro in the ‘30s, it was natural that its northern European rigor would soften in a land where exuberant curve and color are built into nature itself. Oscar Niemeyer, the great master of Brazilian Modernism, introduced forms that, while minimalist and monolithic, are marked by the playful, the nonfunctional, even the absurd.
Portuguese tradition that stood up to the punishment of Rio’s intense tropical sun and rain. However, he quickly settled on mosaics, an ancient form that was both extremely sturdy and also a puzzle-like conglomeration of distinct elements – rather like architecture itself.
To help adorn their projects, Niemeyer and fellow architect Marcel Roberto turned to Paulo Werneck. Their mutual friend from childhood, Werneck had never studied art formally. However, they knew him to be a tirelessly inventive man. Together with Roberto and Niemeyer, Werneck helped create a new idiom for Brazilian architecture – one that, they hoped, would usher in a happier, more egalitarian future.
Werneck’s mosaics eschewed traditional ways of approaching the genre, which tended to produce either repetitive decorative patterns or realistic figural scenes. Instead, he looked to the Cubists, who had demolished three-dimensional space in favor of deliberately flattened forms. Werneck took the Cubist project to the next level, creating huge, abstract works without any obvious reference to nature. Yet there is nothing arbitrary about his work. It was a direct response to the geometries, as well as the joyful urgency, of his architectural collaborators.
At first, Werneck considered working with painted ceramic tiles, a
Despite his success, Werneck never let his work congeal into a single
style. That was impossible, given his restless intelligence and gregarious nature. For some clients, including government ministries, he executed highly figurative designs. For others, he provided more traditional patterns, though always carefully calibrating his designs to the specifics of the building at hand. And later in his life, he began to create cloud-like forms that resemble not hard pieces of ceramic or glass but rather freeform watercolors whose hues seep and mix together. Today you can still encounter Werneck’s timeless mosaics amid the contemporary chaos of Rio’s downtown. Dynamic yet balanced, abstract yet full of human vitality, simple-seeming yet packed with complex optical effects, his work is not just beautiful but, like Modernist architecture at its best, actually capable of “refining” our ability to perceive the world around us. Robert Landon
aïshti magazine 195