LOTHAR CHAROUX

We thank the family of the artist for the confirmation of the authenticity of this work, October 2018.

Provenance:
- Estate Lothar Charoux.
- Private collection Switzerland.

Lothar Charoux was born in Vienna in 1912. His uncle, the sculptor Siegfried Charoux, awakened and fostered his interest in art. At the age of 16 Charoux left Austria and emigrated to Brazil, where he lived in Sâo Paulo until his death in 1987. He studied painting at the Liceu de Artes e Oficios de Sâo Paulo under Waldemar de Costa. Influenced by his uncle and his teacher, Charoux first turned to Expressionism. His early work consisted for the most part of landscapes and portraits. He began increasingly to examine architectural questions and was fascinated by the relationship of tension between surfaces and lines, as well as between the figure and the background.

His artistic development was leading him noticeably towards Concrete Art, and this culminated in his membership of “Grupo Ruptura”. In 1952 seven artists, including Lothar Charoux, signed the manifesto written by Waldemar Cordeiro, which for the first time in Brazil identified a clear demarcation between Concrete and Figurative art. The publication led to a lively public debate on the two concepts of art. The spokesperson for figurative art was the art critic Sérgio Milliet, who four days after the founding of “Grupo Ruptura”, published a counter-argument in a daily newspaper. In the same year, the exhibition “Ruptura” took place at the Museu de Arte Moderna de Sâo Paulo.

In its manifesto the group asserted that the new values in the visual arts were space and time, as well as movement and matter. In their eyes these new values offered the artist the freedoms and unimagined possibilities of artistic inquiry. “They want a new art for a modern country, shaped by truth and rationality, portrayed through a mathematical, geometrical language of form!” (quote. www.arte-conreta.com) It is therefore only logical that they demanded the break (“ruptura”) with previous art and concepts of art, since they were convinced that the historical function of figurative art was exhausted and had no further meaning for the present and the future. Although the group broke up after a few years, Concrete Art and the lively exchange of ideas connected with it had taken hold.

Lothar Charoux is one of the most important exponents of Concrete Art in Brazil. The two works presented here captivate with their consummate application of the line as ordering principle as well as spatial arrangement. The ebb and flow of the lines creates depth and dynamism, and the viewer discerns the different levels within the painting.
In the coloured composition on yellow ground from 1971, the artist skilfully succeeds in bringing the various colours together in an elegant, harmonious composition. The levels of the picture blend and exude a great sense of calm. Colour, composition and background become one unity.
The second, blue and white painting exists in terms of contrasts. Against a blue background Charoux places a weave of white lines, which in turn is characterised by contrasting forms – even, vertical lines are pierced by circles, which in turn are filled with squares.
Different as these two works seem at first glance, they powerfully demonstrate Lothar Charoux’s fascination with mathematical precision and his love of play with form and colour in order to create space. In examining the ideas of Concrete art, Charoux succeeds in creating a quite distinct approach in his works, which give them a great recognition value and uniqueness.