Abstract
Most scholarship on Neo-concretism tends either to ignore Ferreira Gullar's early poetry or simply reiterate the poet's own account of his book A Luta Corporal (1954) as concerned solely with the implosion of language. However, Gullar's book also engages with a sustained existential meditation on temporality and finitude through images of material expenditure, with pears and apples recurring throughout its pages as self-consuming entities that dramatize the inexorability of time. Fruit would later become a metaphor for the effect of color in the Neoconcrete production of painter Aluisio Carvão, with Gullar suggesting that the “resistance of the object” is overcome in his works by the way our vision is made to linger on “the pulp of color.” Can it be that expenditure returns within Neoconcrete theory in the guise of fruit? If so, then the movement's generally undisputed association with a redemptive phenomenology will have to be reviewed in order to accommodate a far more anxiety-ridden conceptual facet.