SPOTLIGHT: JOSE ROBERTO BASSUL: PORTFOLIO CONTEST WINNER

Throughout the history of art, in any medium or genre, one can find conversations between artists about the artwork they make, which in turn, affects the artwork they make. It’s an important aspect of the creative process that passes by most viewers. The visual arts, performing arts, literature and architecture all gain something from this discourse between artists. Sometimes these “conversations” are direct, in that one might find documented dialogues between artists, the exchange resulting in a noticeable impact on their work. There are also conversations between artists that happen on an unconscious level: when they work in the same medium, use the same materials, while expressing the same idiom. The end result showing subtle similarities coming from what one would call a commonality.

The well-regarded Brazilian architect and photographer José Roberto Bassul explores this seldom discussed, yet important train of exchanges in his series Diálogo Abstrato | Abstract Dialogue. The interchange between artists is frequently difficult to tease out, but Bassul has shown us a way to see the sometimes intentional and sometimes unintentional back and forth between artists. Bassul’s case in point reveals a visual conversation between two internationally renowned contemporary architects, Álvaro Siza Vieira (1933–present) and Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012).

Bassul explains his discovery: “When I photographed, in 2019, the extraordinary building of the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, I knew that this was the only work by Álvaro Siza Vieira built in Brazil. With the camera, I collected visual fragments of the subtlety of the greatest Portuguese architect. Sometime later, I realized an incredible coincidence. Oscar Niemeyer, the most important Brazilian architect, also has only one work in Portugal: the Pestana Casino Park Hotel on Madeira Island. In 2021, when a respite from the pandemic allowed it, I also collected abstract fractions of that building.”

Bassul’s series shows side-by-side comparisons between these two works by Vieira and Niemeyer. He’s cast the visual parallels as insights into their personalities: “All the photos taken of Siza’s building are light, in shades of gray. This is because Siza’s style is subtle, almost silent (as he is in person). All the photos taken of Niemeyer’s hotel are dark, in strong contrast. This is because Niemeyer’s style is bolder, more eloquent.”

To better understand Bassul’s comparative accomplishment, I would encourage the reader to look up these two buildings. Though both are examples of modernist architecture, from the photographs online, one would be hard pressed to see any similarities between these two edifices. Bassul is able to see conversation in the lines, shapes, shadows and forms because he is attuned to Vieira’s and Niemeyer’s design philosophies as well as the poetic way in which they see and use space. It also helps that Bassul is a trained architect as well as a photographer, which gives him an aesthetic sensibility that people photographing architecture may lack.

We become more aware of the political and philosophical affinity Bassul has for Vieira and Niemeyer—who are/were both champions of designing housing for the urban poor—by reading his essay titled “City Statute: Building a Law.” (In it, Bassul frames the decades-long movement towards legislating building laws and codes to make Brazil’s housing equitable.) He ends his essay with this insight concerning the new law, “…cities nevertheless are magnets which, like no other type of human grouping, bring together a mass of cultural and material facilities capable of boosting standards of dignity, ethical principles and educational and cultural levels that should underpin all organized societies.”

Ultimately, Bassul engages in his own dialogue with Vieira and Niemeyer by showing us what he sees and values in their work —“the borderless language of poetry." Ultimately, poetry is for Bassul a necessary outcome of great architectural design: “For me, buildings are personas. They introduce themselves, tell stories, pose, talk, disdain, pretend. First I observe them, distant, ceremoniously. I move away from some. Some others I approach and address them. In response, I receive poems.”