Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), B17 Glass Bólide 05 ‘Homage to Mondrian’, 1965, glass, textile, water, pigment and cork, 30 x 47.5 x 60 cm, © Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

The American art critic Clement Greenberg famously wrote that a blank canvas is already a picture, but perhaps not a successful one. This sets a very low bar for picture-making. We can all make pictures if we know how to stretch canvas. Everyone is an artist.

But what about the other raw ingredient of painting: paint or pigment. Is a container of pigment a painting? The work of Brazilian artist, Hélio Oiticica  (1937-1980), turns our attention to this question and the evocative power of colour and pigment.

Homage to Mondrian is from a series of works that Oiticica called bólides, usually translated as fireballs. Mostly the bólides use fiery colours like yellow, red and orange.  The pigment here is dissolved into water and used as a dye to colour the drapery that corks the bottle. The colours used are Mondrian’s primaries but his strict geometry is nowhere to be seen. Canvas and pigment are assembled into a sensuous sculptural form rather than being more conventionally displayed in two-dimensions. We have all the ingredients of painting—textile and pigment—but the composition is in real space. So, do you think this can be considered a painting? SB

Susan Best is the author of Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde, winner of the AAANZ (Art Association of Australia & New Zealand) Best Book Prize for 2012, and Professor of Art Theory, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on women’s art, conceptual art and South American art.