Taking as a point of departure the fact that art is a system (a linguistic-semantic system, but also a system of circulation and exchange) Dias conceived the emblematic shape of a rectangle with a missing angle as a leitmotiv for this series. This shape, which he revisited ceaselessly until the end of his career, could exist as a flag, as a painting, as an inscription on the ground, as a drawing, etc. It intends to convey the idea that art is a field, a conceptual field, which status is never fully accomplished, always short of completeness, time and again fragmented, imminent.

In Dias’ works, the system of art lives through a dialectics of veiling and unveiling: forms, surfaces, figures, faces, bodies, facts. By covering newspapers and magazines with paint and natural pigments, Dias was able to refer to the urgency of time, to the emergence and exhaustion of history. But it is the modular quality of his works that are able to expand and to concentrate, systolic and diastolic in their eventual configurations that bridged ideas and bodies, painting and history, art and life.

—Luis Pérez-Oramas, 2020.

antonio dias
b. 1944 in Campina Grande, PB, Brazil
lived and worked between Milan, Italy, and Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
d. 2018 in Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

Antonio Dias began his career in the 1960s, producing works marked by political criticism in the form of paintings, assemblages, installations, and videos. Even though the artist refused to be attached to any artistic movement of his time, his work is often considered a benchmark in Brazilian Pop Art and Neo Figurativism. His practice is interwoven by the legacy of the Neo-concrete movement and an early awareness of the revolutionary impetus of Tropicalia. In 1966, during his self-exile in Paris after subtle criticism from the Brazilian military dictators, the artist came into contact with artists of the Italian avant-garde movement Arte Povera, namely Luciano Fabro and Giulio Paolini. In the European context, he increasingly turns to abstraction, transforming his style.