Waldemar Cordeiro's Oeuvre and Its Context: A Biographical Note

In Arteônica, Cordeiro's seminal text on electronic art, he stated that Brazilian Concrete art employed digital creative methods and offered algorithms largely employed in communications. It must be clarified that he did not use the words "digital" and "algorithms" literally here. He was not referring to actual computer programs; rather, he was suggesting that the visual forms created by Concrete art were applicable to mass communications and graphic and industrial design. It was not until 1969 that Cordeiro, working in collaboration with physicist Giorgio Moscati, created his first visual computer artwork. In this and in subsequent computer artworks (the last produced before his premature death of a heart attack in 1973), Cordeiro synthesized his lifelong concern with radically innovative forms and the social and political dimension of art. Cordeiro started his career exploring purely visual geometric abstract forms, only to incorporate semantically charged shapes and objects at a later stage. Ultimately, in his computer art, mathematical abstraction (as digitized and processed imagery) and political and emotional concerns (as content-oriented art) came together in a truly original and challenging way for the first time in his career. In forging this unique synthesis, the product of a natural evolution of his ideas, Cordeiro produced some of the most important works of the first phase of computer art. Abraham Moles, Pierre Restany, and Jonathan Benthall are among the international critics who recognized Cordeiro's early contribution to the incipient new art. In the context of Brazilian art, his work ranks as one of the most innovative and stimulating, side by side with Flávio de Carvalho, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and Abraham Palatnik. If we are to write the history of electronic art from a truly global perspective, we must acknowledge Waldemar Cordeiro's pioneering contribution.