Hermelindo Fiaminghi was a multiple artist with an intense presence in the cultural scene of São Paulo. Their various professional experiences mutually influenced their imagery research. Even though he was one of the protagonists of the São Paulo concrete group, Fiaminghi devoted most of his career, from 1960 to 1990, to investigating the use of color. He names this important part of his production by the term Corluz, sometimes opting for the use of photolithotic grids and offset in CMYK, sometimes for the use of tempering.
Born in São Paulo in 1920, Fiaminghi attended the Lyceum of Arts and Crafts in São Paulo between 1936 and 1941, where he studied painting with Waldemar da Costa. During the same period, he studied graphic arts, dedicating himself for a long time to lithography and working in the main graphic industries in São Paulo. In 1946, he opened Graphstudio, his graphic production office, which led him to work in the advertising area. It was in the following decade that his production as a painter began to take shape. In the mid-1950s, Fiaminghi joined the group of concrete artists from São Paulo coordinated by Waldemar Cordeiro, actively participating in the 1st National Exhibition of Concrete Art, contributing to poem-poster projects by great concrete poets, such as Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari and acting in the graphic production of Noigandres magazine. The works, which present little variety of colors at that moment, create a visual rhythm and work with the suggestion of displacement of geometrized figures. Afterwards, the artist participated in the creation of the Ateliê Coletivo do Brás and developed the Virtuais series. Between 1959 and 1966, Fiaminghi frequented Volpi’s studio, deepening his tempera painting technique and increasingly exploring the transparency of colors. In 1963, he co-founded the Associação de Artes Visuais and the Galeria Novas Tendências, in São Paulo, and six years later, he founded the Ateliê Livre de Artes Plásticas, in São José dos Campos, of which he was director and professor. In the 1980s, his brushstroke definitely moved away from concrete rigidity: in the series Desretratos and Despaisagens, the artist presents freer gestures, which reveal color as a floating surface.