Brazilian VW design director Luiz Veiga celebrates the Beetle in art exhibition

Earlier this month ‘Luiz Veiga: Tempos de Fusca' (Beetle Times) opened at the small OMA gallery in Sao Bernardo do Campo, Brazil. This exhibition proves not only a celebration of the Volkswagen icon, but also an opportunity to learn a little more about one of its exhibitors – Volkswagen Brazil's design director Luiz Veiga.

Car Design News attended the opening at OMA – located not far from the VW plant – to talk with Veiga about art and design. The venue was packed with designers and admires of the Beetle, locally called 'Fusca', while also in attendance were four other VW studio designers also invited to take part on the show. In total, there were 19 exhibits, each produced with different techniques.

The Fusca holds a special place in Brazilian history, being the first automobile produced in the country when VW established the plant in Sao Bernardo do Campo in 1953 and only replaced in 1980 by the Gol.

Luiz Veiga started in the car industry when he was fourteen, drawing gearboxes for GM before joining Volkswagen Brazil 38 years ago as a technical draftsman. One of his first jobs in the company was to draw an assembly manual for the Beetle and, like a renascence master, Veiga has used drawing as the structure of his knowledge and creative expression since. It's no surprise to learn that, in addition to design, he also studied painting at Sao Paulo's School of Fine Arts.

But Veiga doesn't call his pieces art, he prefers 'illustrations', and these are something he practices whenever he has an opportunity: "If a flight is delayed I'm happy. I always carry paper and a pack of pens to enjoy these moments," he says.

One of the pieces on display was created in a pizzeria in Turin, on the paper place mat. Others are from his pocket sketchbook, which he takes to business meetings. Even on large canvases, Veiga still starts with a pen drawing like a designers' sketch, later adding oil or watercolor. In addition to these more traditional works, he also showed several Giclée prints of reworked photographs from a Beetle owners meeting in Wolfsburg.

The plurality of his creative expressions is not commonly seen nowadays, although Veiga points out the art works of his colleague Peter Wouda and former Ford designer Camilo Pardo as a couple of lasting examples.

Historically, this proximity had been a characteristic of car designers' metier, immortalized by the image of Flaminio Bertoni – designer, artist and architect – sculpting the Citroën DS. "Modelling in clay is still the moment the designer feels closer to being an artist," says Veiga. "The automobile is the most sophisticated industrial product most of the people can buy, created through a complex process, and the designer has to bring art to it. Designers are not artist, but are the artists of the industry'."
Luiz Veiga has given a lot of support to design education in Brazil and hopes his example will be reference for new designers to always "stay light and inspired".

Further exhibition details can be found on the OMA website.

By Artur Grisanti Mausbach