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Alberto Carneiro: The Evidence
of Nature
in the Construction of the Human Relationship with the World
By João Fernandes in
catalogue Alberto Carneiro, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea,
Xunta de Galicia, 2001
The oeuvre of Alberto Carneiro awakens
a specifica reflection on the condition of art as the creation of an evidence
of nature in the construction of the human relationship with the world.
The artist´s work throws into relief the action of the body over
matter, reinventing the possible meanings of an appropriation and transformation
of the natural by the human. This process insists upon awareness of art
and cration as a programme of interpretation of the world, in which the
body is revealed through the operations resulting from the metamorphoses
of that same world originated by its behaviour.
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| Sculpture thus
originates from a convergence between space and time, which coincide in
the reciprocal revelation of the natural and the human in the generative
act of artistic creation and of its inherent programme of reflection. Sculpture
is transformed into an event, an omniscient occurrence related to the conditions
of the formulation that define it as the situation of a subject within the
spatio-temporal co-ordinates that grant it an identity, an identity resulting
from a process of individualisation of aesthetic emotion through the insertion
and nomination of the moment shared by artist and beholder. |
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| When the
artist himself attempts to define his art as an “ecological art”
it is advisable not to mistake this denomination for the programme —
which today is both trivial and politically correct — of an ecology
reduced almost to the vindication of realities in the process of disappearing,
or in minority situations. The proposal made by a Manifesto de arte
ecológica (Manifesto of Ecological Art) stems rather from what
the sculptor announces as a relational programme, “the conscious relationship
of signifiers in the organisation of a profound criticism of the meanings
that will subsequently emerge as an authentication of relationships in the
world”. (1) Artistic creation claims for itself a demiurgic and phenomenological
condition in this reciprocally generative relationship established by nature
and the human being, “Nature recreated in our own image: us inside
her and she, polarising our aesthetic feelings.” (2) Alberto Carneiro´s
sculpture is thus a result of a programme of “bi-univocal” transfers
between nature´s signifiers ( a tree, a stone, a flower, water, “a
fistful of soil”) and the universality of meanings, contrived from
the poetical operation of its proposition, sharing the aesthetic emotion
of individual reformulation of its material references. |
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| The creation and
perception of the work of art converge in the oeuvre of Alberto Carneiro
in one single indistinct matrix. The generative dimension of the former
is derived from a programme of appropriation and nomination of metaphorical
materials, processes and references that never trap the beholder in any
restricted denotative context. On the contrary, they show him the possibilities
of a shared allied approximation within an enlargement of sensorial experience
by means of abstract cognitive associations that underline its materiality.
Body and nature are reciprocally introduced and self-defined as categories
susceptible of mediating in aesthetic relationships. These relationships
develop within precise programmes where action and reflection cannot be
dissociated as a result of the coincidence between the rôle played
by materials and situations and a conceptual map of the relationship between
art and life. |
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(1)
Alberto Carneiro, “Notas para um manifesto de arte ecológica”
(Dezembro 1968 — Fevereiro 1972), Alberto Carneiro, Exposição
antológica , Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação
Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa; Fundação de serralves, Porto,
1991, p.62
(2) Ibidem |
