ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 examines the Brazilian painter and landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx’s garden and urban landscape chromatic compositions. Burle Marx designed his landscapes as light performances using an extensive range of bold and muted colors to create tonal contrasts throughout a composition. To understand his landscape color design, I consider his painterly affinities together with his passion for botany, ecology, music, and theater. Inspired by his country’s politics, landscape and cultural mosaic, as well as plant forms and colors, Burle Marx paired color design with modern and regional art, universal and tropical, to create a bricolage of artificial plant and color ecologies. In his landscapes and gardens, patterns and colors unite to create an impression of both permanence and temporality. His approach highlights the dichotomy and reciprocity of painting versus landscape and pigment versus color light.
