“His late years have also bequeathed a group of Bólides Apropriação [Appropriation Bólides] (1978), or Ready-Mades Apropriações [Appropriation Ready-Mades], made from plastic containers that he found among the refuse of empty lots in Rio’s São Cristovão quarter. As objects, these receptacles are as plain as they are common; into each one he introduced materials of equal banality - a handful of earth from Mangueira Hill, water from Ipanema Beach, and fragments of asphalt. One contains nothing but … air. To experience these works is astonishing, for the receptacles are made of a colourless plastic that is opaque and does not allow us to see what is inside them. Only by removing the caps of the bottles and looking closely inside them, our eyes glued to their necks, can we see their contents: water, earth, asphalt, or nothing - simply the raw materials of the world. The experience of these Appropriation Bolides may be summed up as one of almost absurd simplicity yet, once again, they succeed in underscoring the problem of immanence, a seminal concept even in the Neo-Concrete works, in which the artist dealt analogously with the problem of color.
This, then, is the power of the ironic transformative act that Oiticica offers us, one that is practically devoid of formal mediation. He presents us with boxes that have been rejected by the world and yet contain essential parts of the world that “is the museum.” Hélio Oiticica continued to take things from the world and confer expression upon them in order to return them to the world. As a result, he accomplished nothing short of reinventing the world.
Luciano Figueiredo, The Body of Color, Tate Modern and Museum of Fine Arts Houston
