Waldemar Cordeiro

b 1925 in Rome (I). Beginning 1946 he lived in São Paulo (BR), where he died 1973. As a painter at the end of the 1940s, Cordeiro gravitated stylistically toward abstraction and constructivism. In 1951, he showed works at the first Biennial of São Paulo. Together with other abstract painters, he formed the São Paulo-based group «Ruptura,» the organizers of the nation’s first important Concrete Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo. After studying landscape design, he concerned himself with new electronic technologies and their influence on social change. Many of his ideas were set down in his «Manifest Arteônica» (1971), considered a forerunner of telecommunication art. Beginning 1968, he experimented with an IBM 360/44 and, in collaboration with the physicist Giorgio Moscati, produced his first computer artworks, considered Brazil’s first computer drawings. In 1972 he researched with a 4-color plotter – studies brought to an abrupt end by his premature death.