Page 21 - Studio International - October 1965

The VIII Bienal of Sao Paulo
Tomonori Toyofuku, Japan
Meta Colonna I 1964
Bronze
200 x 40 x 20 cm.

how the thin bands of painted and reliefed columns will
divide the existing room dimensions. Robert Irwin.
Billy Al Bengston. Larry Poons and Frank Stella each in
his fashion concedes to form the frame in which the
activity exists to perform what can be a self-indulgent
withdrawal. The autocratic contentment with plain areas
and limited visual stimulation has a response in the
spectator of a sense of suspension. Of the four only
B2ngston takes pains to disperse his attack so that shift
of interest in the end achieves a conclusion in the image.
Poland was distinguished by the paintings of Zbigniew
Gostomski. seen in London previously at the Grabowski
Gallery. His 'Optic objects' are that more or less and in
the straight edges. curves and painted balls. the
aluminium paint gives bright resemblance to the actual
metal. Naif artist Nikifor continues his well-known
meditations on Polish landscape with trains his
perennial obsession. In the applied arts for which she
won the prize. the tapestries of Magdalena Abakano­
wicz harnessed the delight of woven regularity to the
shaggy ·collages· of reliefs. In the grey depths one may
see the indeterminate suggestions of heads and faces
such as might allude to titles Helena, Andromeda etc.
In the Mexican painting. the figuress of Rafael Coronel
1 touch a nerve of tension in their unease. All large, their
characters are awaiting something, their gaze is
riveted on an invisible object. Archaic in their idiom.
their result is a taut mystery.
Throughout the Bienal, painting shows no great devia­
tion from the contemporary trends excepting the
figuratives already mentioned. An abstract figuration in
the sense that the skeleton of humanity becomes a
motive or an ideogram assembled or composed in
different scale and number could be found in such
works as the brilliantly coloured canvases by Walter
Battiss of South Africa in which bushman image at
their simr::lest are drawn into formations of movement
and mass. Gerald Trottier of Canada masses in his can­
vases the overpainted totemic bodies of warrior.
formidably gargantuan in their red presences.
One truly original departure in the whole conspectus
was in the Czechoslovakian pavilion where the glass
sculptures and panels by Stanislav Libensky merged the
transparency of the material in colour intensity with the
broken tonal effect of impasto painting.
Sculpture was largely lacking in any great concentra­
tion of succe:,sfully convincing artifacts. Alberto Viani of
Italy was present only in five works and these had their
own bone-smooth forms arriving at the point of non­
sequitur with much visual satisfaction in the lissome
torsos of marble and bronze. Jean Tinguely in the Swiss
pavilion. equipped with spanner and oil can. supervised
the orgiastic pistoning of his engines, some emitting
worn recordings of bygone melodies. others producing
a mounting scream of metallic abrasion.
The sculptured screens of penetrated wood by
Japanese sculptor Toyufuku so noticeable at the last
Venice Biennale curved their intent patterns into our
attention. here joined by single concave columns
bronzes cast from the matrix wood carvings. Edgar
Negret of Columbia works in the ubiquitous material of
sheet metal. bent and riveted into shapes allusive to
navigation. Coloured in bright reds and blues. they lack
aggressiveness and are both architectonic and objective
in compact completeness. Another sculptor of
sympathetic restraint is from Bolivia, Marina Nunez del
Prado who carves basalt and onyx into forms of com­
plementary concave and convex passages. Dusan
139