Hélio Oiticica, one of the most important Brazilian artists of the 20th century, did not grow old. He was granted just 42 years on earth, from 1937 to 1980, but in this comparatively short time he shook up the art world with his playful and sensual works that explored boundaries of all kinds. He created installations/happenings/practices with such beautiful names as Bilaterals, Bólides, Parangolés and Penetrables, and he is regarded as a co-founder of Tropicalismo.
With his first long documentary, Cesar Oiticica Filho - born in 1968 and himself an artist, exhibition curator and filmmaker - presents a portrait of his uncle, or rather: an ant-like scurrying collection of access routes to his artistic practice and the aesthetic theory on which it is based. Without bothering with explanation, localization or orientation, Oiticica Filho assembles film and sound archive recordings and allows the collage to culminate from time to time in intoxicating storms of images that no longer seem to know an author. Instead, he establishes a striking analogy between the uncle's art, which dissolves the separation between painting, sculpture and performance, and the nephew's attempt to level the threshold between documentary knowledge transfer and experimental expression.
