Espaço Modulado No. 6, or “Modulated Space #6,” belongs to a remarkable series of seminal black-and-white paintings that together encompass Lygia Clark’s unique contribution to the history of art: dismantling the two-dimensional picture plane in a way that was organic, devoid of front or back and inside or outside, integrated with its environment, and above all, in the words of art historian Mário Pedrosa, “phenomenologically affective,” rather than purely sensorial.
Striking in their sophistication and restricted palette, these extraordinary works evoke the lessons of European modernists such as Mondrian and Malevich through a distilled organic purity. In this radical series of Modulated Surfaces dating to the late 1950s, Clark embarked on an extensive and methodical investigation of variations on a central element: the square. She subjects this primal form to myriad serial repetitions - critically, releasing it from spatial restraints in order to allow the pictorial plane twist in all possible directions.
“What I wanted was to express space itself, not to compose within it,”
The transition from two-dimensional painting to the establishment of a relationship between body and object, and later between body and physical act, became a primary impulse.’ (Cornelia H. Butler, et al., Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, Exh. Cat.,The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2014, p. 51) These compositions, constructed only of positive and negative space, transformed Clark’s understanding of the role of the spectator in an artwork from passive to active - a concept that would become one of the key tenets of her oeuvre.
´The viewer no longer projects himself into the work or finds identity in it. He experiences the work, and by living its nature, he leaves himself, within himself. It is there that firsthand experience lies. We are new primitives in a new era, and once again we begin to revive the ritual, the expressive gesture, but now with the concept entirely different from those of all other errors.
Clark made a pivotal breakthrough in 1954, when she became aware of what she termed the “organic line” (linha orgânica) that separated the picture from its frame, claiming the latter, including its seams, as part of the pictorial surface. By this time, Clark had come to understand painting as a functional device for modulating spaces as the name of the series suggests. Within this framework, Clark’s organic line is not a line per se, but rather an imminent break, a fissure in space. If understood as a negative line, it exercises an incision between materials—'something that, in slicing a surface, reveals that surface’s density and materiality, dividing it into two fields or bodies, separating them and in the process indexing the infinite drama of continuity and discontinuity that constitutes space as a site and coordinate of plurality.’ (Luis Perez Oramas in Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, Exh. Cat.,The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2014, p. 40)
Clark’s edgeless paintings are meticulously saturated with industrial paint; their smooth, uniform surfaces disguise the hand of the artist. In Espaço Modulado No. 6, three repeating squares are perfectly aligned in a column; they seem to push beyond the limits of their two-dimensional confines to reach out into the viewer’s space. As Cornelia Butler describes: “It is here that we see Clark’s desire for a living geometry beginning to push and pull at its constraints…No longer uninterrupted planes, the paintings begin to move from within” (op. cit., p. 19).
Espaço Modulado No. 6 is a central painting from this crucial series produced at the apex of Clark’s spatial and formal experimentation. Deeply embedded within the constructs of seriality that anticipate Donald Judd’s Specific Objects and the rise of Minimalism in the United States, the work breaks down traditional notions of space and subverts distinctions between painting and sculpture. Emanating from the wall, it confronts the viewer, leading them to experience its color, texture, weight, height, and gravity, as a material presence. Without the restrictions of a frame, its pigment immerses the spectator in an aura of intense physicality, elegantly reaching beyond the edge of the panel. Espaço Modulado No. 6 is a triumph of NeoConcrete art by one of its most evocative exponents.