São Paulo, Brasil, 1928 —
São Paulo, Brasil, 2018

The solidity of Alexandre Wollner’s work has qualified Brazilian design institutionally and professionally since the second half of the 1950s, remaining as a healthy reference for an area that questions its current purpose amid the dizzying profusion of repetitive and anesthetizing messages, of purposeful senses ephemeral, programmed to obsolescence.

Student of the first classes of the Institute of Contemporary Art (IAC), Wollner became familiar with the ideal of artistic production from an early age that would actively contribute to the transformation of society and culture through the means of industrial production. In 1951, assisting in setting up the exhibition by the Swiss artist Max Bill at the São Paulo Museum of Art (Masp), Wollner discovers a possible way to realize this utopia in the rigorous inventiveness of concrete art, which motivates him to join Grupo Ruptura in 1953.

Exploring the possibilities of concretism, Alexandre Wollner exhibited at the 2nd International Biennial of São Paulo (1953) and received the Young Revelation Painting Award for the work Movement against movement in the space system. Clearly conceived in a concretist register, the screen produces the optical sensation of an unstable centripetal movement made by pointed white threads, angled in a tense relationship with the boundaries of the black square that tries to contain them precariously. In this dynamic movement, the plane curves in a depth forwards and backwards by the observer, opening up new spatial dimensions without resorting to figurative illusionism.

This compositional skill was consolidated in Wollner’s work as a graphic designer, a profession to which he dedicated himself exclusively after attending, invited by Max Bill himself, the Higher School of Form at Ulm, between 1954 and 1958. Returning to Brazil, Wollner joined Rubem de Freitas, Walter Macedo and Geraldo de Barros at the opening of forminform, a pioneering design office where he developed iconic projects such as the remodeling of the Elevadores Atlas and Sardinhas Coqueiro brands. It should be noted that his graphic solutions are based on the primacy of the grid, structural rigor and totalizing design, expressed in an exemplary way in the universe that the designer created between 1980 and 1990 for the visual identity of Banco Itaú.

Wollner also believed that technology should be used as a facilitator of the creative process, without replacing or subduing it, as the perceptions of the quality of form, of resolution as a project and of beauty as communicability are fundamentally human. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the designer started exploring painting again in 2008.

Whether on the screens or in the ordinary media of practical life, Alexandre Wollner’s projective strength creates systems in which the message communicates precisely through the impregnation of form. The admirable result is due to Wollner’s effort to combine the utopian quality of concretist art with the serial feasibility of industrial and technological production, a condition for the conception of the work as a synthesis between art and life.

GGS