José Costigliolo

José Pedro Costigliolo (1902-1985) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. He began his painting studies in 1921 at the Circle of Fine Arts in Montevideo. He worked as an advertising and graphic artist from 1929 to 1946 before dedicating himself entirely to painting. Along with his wife, painter Maria Freire, he was a pioneer of concrete art in Uruguay. He lived in Europe from 1957 to 1959, during which he held various exhibitions in Uruguay and Argentina. In Brazil, his works were exhibited at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (1956) and the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art (1957). He participated in several editions of the São Paulo Biennial (1953, 1955, 1957, 1961) and the Venice Biennale in 1966.

Starting in 1955, influenced by Russian Constructivism and Dutch Neoplasticism, Costigliolo began to produce works that clearly embraced concrete art. According to Frederico Morais, in his study on Uruguayan painting published in "Artes plásticas na América Latina: do transe ao transitório" (1979, Civilização Brasileira), Costigliolo developed a style where the canvas surface appears magnetized, creating visual energy fields that attract small squares and rectangles. These shapes form compact areas that, along with the surrounding spaces, engage in a dynamic process of attraction and repulsion, often resulting in concentric and eccentric movements that fragment and reorganize the visual composition continuously. The incessant movement and visual tension in his works evoke the elementarist dissidence of Van Doesburg, a branch within Neoplasticism, marked by a continuous search for balance and tension between the elements of the painting.

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