From May 20 to Jul 12 2008
Among the myriad attempts to render countless technological transformations of the contemporary world legible, we may observe in subjective conformations of lived experience the predominance of a fluidity deprived of rhythm, said rhythm being understood as corporeal duration and heterogeneity constituted by language. On one hand, it is supposed that the profusion of objects in the world (including those considered artistic) is worth their occasional originality, even if (as ever) the accent converges towards a few relevant themes; on the other, certain trajectories are forged through everyday practice in which certain scansions afford us points of reference in light of the decline or absence of solid ideals. With few exceptions, art works are interesting less for what they add in terms of historical innovation and much more for their uniqueness and the ways in which they help us to understand the presence of what has been achieved by other artists.
A loose-leaf periodical of ephemeral nature that publishes news, interviews, advertisements and information of use to the public, the newspaper is a recurrent presence throughout Luciano Figueiredo?s artistic trajectory. The Noir series produced from 1975 to 1984 ?in which Shadow Book and Imaginary Newspaper are standouts? features collages with newspaper clippings and visual poems composed in Letterset. The next six years saw the appearance of the early Dioramas ?wire screens in which newspaper (transformed into paper mâché) participates in the works as form, volume and weight? and Reliefs made from the same material glued onto voile. The 1990s brought new, folded partially or fully coloured Reliefs, while the current decade presents a different series of Dioramas as well as Muxarabiês in which newspaper (although physically absent in some of the works) continues to be a vigorous presence not only in the lighter or darker residual greys of its visual reality, but also in the diagrammatic structure of the paintings, the mixed and juxtaposed colour planes of which are occasionally delimited by adhesive tape, leading us to mistrust that which is nearer or farthest from us.
Two types of Tercetos are on display here. In the first of these, boxes made of glass and wood contain three separate paintings on canvas in identical formats (15 x 21 cm). Together, the independence of each one is converted into plane and shadow, the constitution of which necessarily takes into account pre-existing forms and colours that are the (hopefully successful) spark of a new work. In the second type there is a sheet of Arches 600 g/m2 paper upon which blown up silkscreened strips of newspaper are printed, their main purpose being to function as lines. Following this, the initial plane is subdivided into three other identically shaped planes affixed in a new, non-rectangular configuration and structured upon layers of canvas. This leads to the existence of sectioned graphic lines and three planes once again made one, upon which colours borne by the fleetingness of the brushstrokes begin to be deposited until the moment when that which had already been printed is intercalated with what is painted to give news of something that has undergone a metamorphosis at the artist?s hands.
The confluence of discrete elements ?lines, planes and colours? and their effects, which present themselves in both types of Tercetos, can be recovered by everyday language in at least four different ways: i) through that which is ephemeral ?and, by extension, transitory? language allows us to say it passes like a shadow, in the blink of an eye; ii) in newspaper presses, the terça is the last proof prior to printing ? a final verification of corrections; iii) to plan is to structure a work by arranging it in a certain way; and iv) among the meanings of this very same verb is that of outlining, laying down lines according to which intention or design may be concretized or solved.
In the paintings of the same format collected in the glass and wood boxes, the diaphanous nature of the more fluid brushstrokes teaches us how, applied over the squares and rectangles of colour they support, they identify the passage of time and, therefore, presage what rhythms they do allow. In the works on paper, in turn, rather than serve the deconstructed, rearranged planes of an operation in which painting tends to occupy space, they remain self-absorbed, performing a function of concealment from the next planes of colour superimposed upon them without ignoring them. Thus, one notices divergence between a merely supposed planomania and the modes according to which each painting is defined. There is no drive to wander freely, paintbrushes in hand, lost in reverie, nor to exceeding what the redefinition of planes and lines suggests or allows. Almost distractedly, the artist?s task is to maintain serenely attentive, analogously suspended listening in order to extract the inter-relationships of colours from between the lines ?not various and always saturated, in the sense of a structure with but a single type of connection? that would allow its point of suspension to be seen, transformed into metaphor by the printed lines? loss of graphic emphasis; this would relay to the public the occasion on which, for the artist, the perennial or the undying (subjective for each one of us) can awaken from transience, that is, in which the fleetingness or impermanence condensed by the newspaper (news and payment for daily work) changes its state or condition to become something worth holding close to ourselves like the presage of a life that renews itself until the end.
Luiz Eduardo Meira de Vasconcellos