“Much like a stonemason building a wall, my recent work seems to be anchored in a step-by-step process of composing formal puzzles. I have grown fond of the pared-down tools of line, form and color and the bountiful yield of their juxtapositions, without the need of references or symbolic otherness to give them meaning.”
Robert Kelly
Born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1956, Robert Kelly has lived and worked in New York since graduating from
Harvard University in 1978. Before dedicating himself entirely to painting in 1982, Robert Kelly worked as a commercial photographer for Polaroid. Since then, solo exhibitions of his work have been displayed in centers for art around the world, including San Francisco, Copenhagen, Turin, Santa Fé, Monterey, Houston,
Vancouver and New York, and is now bringing his new work to Rio de Janeiro.
Robert Kelly’s work sits within the broad tradition of Constructivism – a lineage of artists that encompasses some of the most important names in Modernism. The Dutch Piet Mondrian, part of the De Stijl movement, and the Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich are two of the artists who influenced Kelly from the outset.
Also on the list are the Bauhaus artists and teachers, forming we could call the first great generation of
Constructivist artists. But Kelly’s influences are wider still, both temporally as geographically, and are not restricted to the first wave of Constructivism. Equally important are the artists who have gravitated – some nearer and some further away – around the Constructivist nucleus: the Romanian sculptor Constantin
Brancuși , the Uruguayan painter Joaquin Torres-Garcia, the American sculptor Alexander Calder, Tony Smith with his pre-minimalist structures, several generations of German artists, the Modernists Kurt Schwitters and
Hans Arp, and, the contemporary, Blinky Palermo. Kelly’s influences range far and wide, and are almost always linked to the geometric shapes of Constructivism, while still allowing room for a handful artists who do not fit that mold, such as Bill Traylor, Louise Bourgeois, Philip Guston and Richard Diebenkorn.
From the 1990s, and with an already consolidated artistic output, Kelly came across and drew closer to the work of some of our most important Constructivist and Neo-Concrete artists, notably Sergio Camargo, Lygia
Clark and Hélio Oiticica. The mainstream of influence apparent in Brazilian art, traditionally a one-way direction from North to South, is inverted in Robert Kelly’s work, making his art particularly interesting to the
Brazilian public. rua joão borges, 86 | 22451-100 | gávea, rj, brasil | +55 21 2294 4305 | www.mercedesviegas.com.br | galeria@mercedesviegas.com.br

Despite having come into contact with them relatively late, the influence of the Brazilian artists is present in the convergence of the processes of the creation of forms, determined not by an axiom, but generated from and through the very process of their materialization. There is no anterior rational principle guiding the actions of artist. In Kelly’s own words: “I don’t want to paint something; I want to let a painting become itself”.
The process is predominantly in the creation of the form, allowing the dynamic of the painting to establish what is painted.
Sometimes the process becomes visible in the way in which the forms of an earlier work give birth to new ones. Forms that are born from other forms, in a series of self-engendering variations, yet are not ruled by any discernible law or reductive formula. The forms are clear and simple – without being simplistic – as understanding requires. In an elegant and refined game of formal variations, the surface of the painting is actioned and the limits of the canvas are activated in the tangents of a circle or the contiguity of a rectangle.
The limits between inside and out are questioned, in a projection of the relationship between the sphere of art and the sphere of life.
Here and there, a transparency allows us to make out a spatiality new to the canon of the Concrete movement. In some other moment in history this may have been considered heretical, but today it reveals itself perfectly coherent and assimilable on the canvas – and, just like in the overlaps of the work itself, the form’s sensitive order is superimposed on the rational order. The autonomy of the form is reaffirmed, and with it, its independence emphasized, as much in the referential world of the senses, as in the purely rational world. The forms derive meaning from their mode of coming to be in the world, as works of art. “I don’t so much want to remember myself in the painting,” Kelly states, “as I want the painting to assume its own authority.”
The emblematic conjunction of the Russian Constructivist Malevich and the French-Algerian existentialist,
Albert Camus, is the synthesis of Robert Kelly’s work. In the process of creation, Kelly lays down layers of printed sheets, envelopes, posters, and manuscripts that serve as a base for the elegant geometric forms.
Layers of existence are patiently added, one on top of another, in a slow and meticulous task of stratification.
Time and life are gradually deposited on the surface of the work: a geographical location is signaled through a foreign language, a temporal reference revealed through typesetting, or in a letter, a stamp, a date.
Specificities, the world of contingencies, individual lives leaving behind traces of their day-to-day. The layers of paint allow us to just about make out their existence – marks that are almost erased, time blurring the outlines of things, memory that retains general traces only. The real world; daily events buried by layers of paint and oblivion. And ruling over this world is the geometrical forms, autonomous and pure and rua joão borges, 86 | 22451-100 | gávea, rj, brasil | +55 21 2294 4305 | www.mercedesviegas.com.br | galeria@mercedesviegas.com.br

uncontaminated by phenomenological contingency. In its limpidity it superimposes itself on the phenomena of the day to day. It engages with the real world, but does not depend on it. It inserts itself in matter, but has its existence guaranteed as a being of reason. It floats beyond the material and the temporal. What is the relationship between these two strata of reality. Philosophy has always attempted to articulate them both, but only art has allowed them to co-exist.
Robert Kelly’s work is included in the collections of some of the most prestigious museums and cultural institutions in Europe and the United States, among them:
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Museum of
Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Smith College Art Museum, Northampton
MA; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutger’s University, NJ; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts,
Montgomery; The Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; and the McNay Art
Museum, San Antonio, TX.
Jorge Sayão 1
Rio de Janeiro, 2015
1 Jorge Sayão is PhD in Art History in the History Department at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, PUC-RJ.
rua joão borges, 86 | 22451-100 | gávea, rj, brasil | +55 21 2294 4305 | www.mercedesviegas.com.br | galeria@mercedesviegas.com.br