He co-founded Brazil’s Tropicália movement, fled fascism, pioneered immersive art in his flat, became a drug dealer and then died aged 42. Now his wild world is being rebuilt at the English seaside
In the early hours of 13 March 1973, the artist Hélio Oiticica was at his downtown New York loft, high on cocaine, with his friend, the film-maker and fellow Brazilian Neville D’Almeida. He reached for the nearest thing at hand on which to cut another line – Weasels Ripped My Flesh, an LP by Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention – and as he snorted, the artist noticed how the specks of powder sprayed out across the illustration of a man having his face lacerated. This transgressive interruption to what was already a violent image appealed to the pair of them, and they hit on the idea of using the drug as “paint” to deface the images of a series of similarly boundary-pushing icons of pop culture.
“We decided to transform it from cocaine to ‘white colour’. It was no longer cocaine, it was just a colour, it was like transubstantiation,” says D’Almeida, now 82, sitting in the garden of his Rio de Janeiro home.
