His atelier
At the summit of the vegetal world: the Nova Viçosa studio
Frans Krajcberg lived in an atelier nestled in Nova Viçosa, Brazil… which he had built atop the branch of an enormous tree! He conceived this idea after lengthy discussions with his friend, architect José Zanine Caldas, another visionary nomad whose favored material was also wood.
The story of his atelier is the story of a dream realized for our artist. It began in 1967 when a friend offered him the massive trunk of a thousand-year-old tree called “pequi,” which had been felled. This was no ordinary tree; it was the king of the Amazon forest — Frans Krajcberg was awestruck. He didn’t take the entire tree, only one of its branches, so vast that it measured 2.60 meters in diameter and weighed 40 tons. Transporting it, installing it, and building his atelier atop it — 10 meters above the ground — was a true feat!
Living perched in the trees like a bird, suspended between sky and earth, was for Krajcberg a way to live in harmony with nature. As if his atelier had always existed, it blends seamlessly into its surroundings. It is surrounded by an airy, light-filled veranda. Inside, Krajcberg adorned several walls with leaves he had gathered during his walks — walls that became painterly canvases, a sort of camouflage wallpaper.
As his friend Thérèse Vian said in 2003, while preparing the exhibition Art and Revolt at the Montparnasse Museum, “For Krajcberg, this house corresponds to the importance he attaches to nature and to the place it would take in his artistic work and existential approach. He needed to combine architecture and art, to create a house like a large sculpture, alive and habitable, whose plastic unity could assert itself as a true installation, in the sense of a work well done and accomplished. It would be the total integration of the forms of nature, fundamental to the artist’s work. In perfect harmony with verticality and horizontality, he managed to keep intact the links between sky and earth.
Krajcberg worked on the project of a house suspended in a tree that would give him extraordinary lightness and fulfill his old dream: to feel suspended between earth and sky, thus returning to primitive life. This house, he wanted it to be closely tied to its environment, without deforming or violating what surrounded it, as if it had always existed.
He was fascinated by the idea of bringing together here the four elements: the earth at the foot of the tree acts as the primordial image of Mother Earth, fertile and reassuring; the air circulating all around, a subtle element, is the active and masculine principle; the waters of the sea and of the Mangue symbolize the materia prima. They come from the sky to fertilize the earth.
Finally, fire, encountered in all initiatory rituals of transformation, represents death and rebirth of all life (mineral, vegetal, animal, or human).”
At that time, José Zanine Caldas and Frans Krajcberg, each in their own way, became aware of the local reality. As Marie-Odile Briot, curator of the exhibition Moderninade at the Paris Museum of Modern Art in 1987, pointed out: “Each embodies—one in architecture, the other in sculpture—the most accomplished expression of this material (wood) within the same aesthetic: a refusal of the ‘technocratic’ uniformity of the International Style as the sole expression of modernity. They opposed this universal leveling of the imagination with an invention of forms based on local materials. The rooting of modernity in matter and active memory resembles the sensibility of Tropicalism that was then influencing the arts.”
Helio Oiticica’s Tropicalia dates from 1967. For him, it represents one of the first attempts in Brazil at objective awareness, aiming to impose a typically Brazilian image in the avant-garde context of the time. Frans Krajcberg here also reconnects with an aspect of modernism: Pau Brasil (Brazilwood) by Oswald de Andrade, dating back to 1924.