Perceptism

Perceptism was a brief but consequential offshoot of Argentine concrete art, proclaimed in Argentina in 1946-47 by Raúl Lozza after he broke with the Asociación Arte Concreto Invención. Where concrete painting still sat in a frame like a window, Perceptism dissolved the frame: flat colored forms were cut to their own logic - the autonomy of form - and arranged coplanar on the wall, so the work continued into the architecture holding it and the wall's light, color and space became part of the picture. Lozza theorized the approach in manifestos written with his brother Rembrandt van Dick Lozza and fellow artists Abraham Haber and Alberto Molenberg. Their collaboration was short-lived, but the idea that an artwork could belong to its surrounding surface rather than to a rectangle fed later Argentine debates about concrete art and its integration with architecture.

Defining characteristics

• Flat, autonomous colored forms with no representational reference
• No frame and no illusion of depth - the work is a surface, not a window
• Forms arranged coplanar, distributed along a single continuous plane
• Unmodulated industrial paint on plain, hard-edged shapes
• The supporting wall treated as part of the work: its color, light and space complete the composition

Key figures

• Raúl Lozza (1911-2008) — Founder and theorist of Perceptism, earlier a founder of the Asociación Arte Concreto Invención

Sources

• Perceptism - WikiArt institution
• Perceptismo - Wikipedia (es) encyclopedia

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