Untitled (Atelier de Vieira da Silva, France)

Before his emergence as a principal figure in Brazil’s Concrete art movement, de Barros honed a highly experimental approach to photography in mid-century São Paulo, broaching abstraction in his groundbreaking series of Fotoformas (1948-51). Dismantling the photographic process, the Fotoformas incorporated cut and painted negatives, multiple exposures, and pinhole photography among other techniques that confound representation, estranging the familiar. A montage of images taken from the Portuguese painter Vieira da Silva’s atelier in Paris, the present work disorients vision, its planes of windows—grilled and geometric—superimposed and rotating dynamically in space.