Waldemar Cordeiro

Waldemar Cordeiro was born in Rome in 1925. He studied art in Italy at the Accademia di Belle Arti during the early 1940s. After the Second World War, he moved to Brazil and settled in São Paulo, later becoming a Brazilian citizen. In São Paulo, he worked as a journalist and art critic for major newspapers and continued producing caricatures and political illustrations for the press, a practice he had begun in Italy. During this period, he was active in organizing exhibitions and artist-led initiatives and completed early public mural projects. In the mid-1950s, he started to work as a landscape designer, producing gardens, plazas, and other public commissions across Brazil.

Cordeiro’s artistic work changed over time in response to shifts in method, materials, and context. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he emerged as a pioneer of Brazilian Concrete Art, producing abstract and geometric paintings and establishing its theoretical framework through manifestos and critical writing. This position was formalized through his role in founding Grupo Ruptura, where he articulated a rejection of figurative representation and defined the artwork as a constructed object based on relationships of line, color, and structure. During the 1960s, his practice expanded to include intuitive geometry, semantic concrete art, and Popcreto. These works introduced text, photographic imagery, mirrors, and assemblage and coincided with a growing engagement with social and political conditions in Brazil.

Beginning in 1968, he was among the first artists in Brazil to work with computers and is widely regarded as a pioneer of computer art in Brazil and Latin America. He referred to this body of work as arteônica, a term he used to describe the creative use of electronic and computational systems in art. This work followed from his earlier investigations in concrete and semantic art, which centered on image structure and visual communication. Working with physicist Giorgio Moscati, Cordeiro used mainframe computers at the University of São Paulo and later at the University of Campinas. He developed procedures that translated photographic images into numerical values, processed through grids and tonal coding to produce printed compositions. These works treated computation as a method for organizing and transforming images rather than as an expressive medium.

Cordeiro received institutional recognition during his lifetime, including the Prêmio Leirner de Arte Contemporânea in 1959 and the Prêmio Itamaraty at the São Paulo Biennial in 1965 and 1967. His work has been showcased in museums in Brazil and internationally, including exhibitions at The Mayor Gallery in London and at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. His work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. Cordeiro passed away in São Paulo in 1973.