The Impact Of Hercules Barsotti

BARSOTTI WAS A MAN OF MANY TALENTS

It’s hard to look at Hércules Barsotti’s work and not feel inspired by it, don’t you think? The colorfulness of his pieces are definitely part of his signature, alongside geometric shapes, lines and a strong technique. We used Hércules’ work as inspiration for one of our design explorations (our chance to have some fun as designers) and here we’ll focus on telling more of his story and his art.

Born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1914, Barsotti was a man of many talents: painting, graphic design, scenography and costume design – a lot of cool stuff, basically. The 50s is when he started his work as an artist, drawing two-dimensional art usually with a black & white color palette. Spoiler alert: with this as his starting point, you can already tell that his work kept evolving over the years.

These drawings used geometric shapes and lines that were mostly mathematical and technical, as he was part of the Neo-Concrete Movement, a Brazilian art movement that rejected the pure rationalist approach of concrete art and embraced a more phenomenological and less scientific art. He generally used formal and somewhat rigid geometric lines and shapes, making him a representative of the Neo-Concrete movement through and through.

During the 50s, he created many pieces with ink on paper as his main tools, utilizing lines to create aesthetically pleasing angles and spaces in his artwork. The 60s witnessed a slight change in his work, which was the use of monochromatic planes and geometric inflections. This was the beginning of his explorations of colors with different formats, as well as his space explorations with the rhythmic usage of various geometric shapes, leading up to the colorful geometric pieces we used as inspiration.

The keywords to describe our designs are: geometric, movement and colorful – just like most of Hércules’ pieces. It was very important for us to not only create interesting pieces that could inspire others and stand out on their own, but we also wanted to live up to what Barsotti did and his lifework. We wanted to pay homage to him the right way, and we think we did, but you can be the judge of that.