Coleção Brasiliana
Livros e coleçoes

Nelson Augusto

1942

1994

Brasiliana Collection
Books and Collections

paper
acrylic
wood

height: 10.5cm
width: 19cm
depth: 8cm

Object

Donated by Nelson Augusto 1998

2-1998

Coleção Brasiliana was made for an exhibition, at the Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, as part of a series entitled Livros e Coleçãos. The series comprised 'minicoleçãos' of books, each made from folded and painted paper and organised into boxes (or shelves). Each title refers to a book or to a series of publications in which colour had been used to give force or distinction to title or content, or for which Augusto himself devised a colour resonating with the mood of the book. The title Coleção Brasiliana was taken from the name of a series of studies on Brazilian culture; the choice of colour (deliberate in its obviousness) the green and yellow of Brazil's national flag. Livros e Coleçãos is consistent with Augusto's renewed interest in the subjective, local and geographical associations of colour. As an abstract painter this development brought him closer to the palette of Rio's sixties school of abstraction, Neo-Concretism, and thus to the work of his first teachers, Aluísio Carvão and Lygia Pape.

The charged use of colour within literature that Livros e Coleçãos explores is global, but this series also holds associations specific to Brazil. 'Brasiliana' is a collective term commonly used to refer to paintings and writings produced when Brazil was a subject of Enlightenment fascination in the 19th century. Another of the works in the Livros e Coleçãos series is entitled Verdes Moradas (Green Mansions), the name of a tale of intrigue amongst dense tropical forest, a backdrop that is portrayed with horror and fascination by the book's author, Argentine born, British bred adventurer and naturalist W.H. Hudson (1841-1922).
Isobel Whitelegg

2008