Paulo Roberto Leal (1946–1991) began his artistic career in the late 1960s. Based in Rio de Janeiro, he had the historical distance to perceive the importance of the Neo-Concretism of the preceding generation of Brazilian artists, especially Willys de Castro’s combination of emptiness, inventive settings, and painting in his “Objetos ativos” (Active Objects), ca. 1959–63, and Lygia Clark’s invention of the “organic line” when she abandoned the canvas in the mid-1950s in favor of works constructed from wooden panels with spaces between them. Each of those gaps made up, in the words of the critic