Haptic perception

Doris von Drathen

Translated by Matthew Partridge

    On his trek across the Sahara the explorer Sven Lindqvist elaborated his meditations on the desert from the terse realization that it represented little more than a fleeting interlude between two European ice ages. Likewise, Madeira was formed in a geologically recent period of intense volcanic activity. What, after all, are a mere four million years compared to the four thousand million years since the earth developed its crust? How soon will this island be swallowed back into the ocean that once spat it out from its interior as a lava fountain?

    The painter João Queiroz spent a month working on this island he describes as a ‘hole in the ocean’. Madeira is ‘the inversion of a hole – a very high mountain surrounded by extreme depths of water’. Although he pretends no special interest in geology, his unsentimental manner of approaching nature as an unappropriable fact of life is reminiscent of a scientist’s mindset. It offers absolutely nothing to cling to – artist’s viewpoint, vanishing point perspective, pictorial composition, not even a trace of adherence to formal principles or academic proportions can be discerned. Sky and landscape could easily be inverted and any assertion of top and bottom seems questionable. Clouds might assume the appearance of mountain formations, while rocks seem almost to fly, with stretches of vegetation merging into topographical contours, shadows changing into trails of velocity, light acquiring material weight and voluminous cliffs simply disintegrating.

    One’s skin begins to feel uncomfortably taut in the face of the dark grey mountain ridge that fills the entire canvas. Nothing more than a slender line running close to the picture’s top edge hints at the contour of a sky. This mass of rock seems strangely charged with tension, as if it were on the verge of bursting or about to explode. The folds and cracks on its surface suggest a kind of clenched strain, as though this mass contained something eerily untoward. This mountain is not so much an element of nature as an event. For the viewer, the picture itself cannot be explored with the eyes, but is felt directly by his skin as an occurrence – as if the canvas offered a surface where the boundaries of two distinct modes of experiencing the world intersect. Indeed, as a process painting itself is skin, a boundary between interior and exterior realms. Queiroz does not paint visual observation, but haptic experience, the sensation of what lies beneath the surface. His screen onto the world is not the eye but a sensory organ that ‘reacts directly’, as he puts it. ‘Skin is analogous to nature,’ he explains, because ‘anthropological skin reacts similarly to the earth’s crust. Each pore is a visual organ – one’s entire skin is a boundary capable of taking in the world. Our eyes, in fact, are nothing more than a concentrated form of this mode of perception. But skin has a different way of seeing and cannot remain outside what is happening.’

    As if the exhibition could somehow be verified and confirmed by nature – this idea is familiar, for instance, from excursions to Mont Sainte-Victoire – the institution hosting Queiroz’s exhibition took us on a trip up into the mountains of Madeira. But once there, were we actually capable of witnessing the event of a clenched, compacted skin of rock? Cast shadows and jagged peaks could by all means be seen against the vast sky. Yet what does ‘aller au motif’ actually mean? What is the significance of such an excursion to the artist, what are the consequences for the viewer? While Cézanne was working in the Provence he once remarked: ‘I am in such a state of mental disarray and such great confusion that I fear I might at any moment lose my weak senses.’ The idea of the tranquil pleasure experienced by a painter going out into nature is just one of the shocking misconceptions to have been perpetrated by bourgeois art appreciation. Exposing oneself to reality surely means nothing other than facing the impossibility of grasping it, nothing other than confronting its awesomeness and recording a fragment of the world in the very moment it slips away. Queiroz says little about his feelings. He paints them instead, as if he were skinning reality. We see the sky above a hill, as though it were pressing it down, observe light and grey-black patches of colour progressively merging, find no trace of dramatic scraps of cloud but ponderous weights lined with black contours bearing down on expanses of brownish colour. In contrast to Cézanne, however, Queiroz’s paintings no longer offer evidence of a search for formal or colour compositional principles in the sense of seeking ‘insight into the essence and laws of natural life and development’. Instead, we witness an artist propelled towards a form of painting that relinquishes fiction and definition in favour of immediate reactive movement. Queiroz paints the impossibility of picturing something. He paints the deceptive tension between what appears to be and what actually is. He paints the sudden sense of terror derived from setting foot on a terrain that one assumed to be firm ground, only to discover that it is a very unsteady, slippery surface. Alarming shadows tow rocks behind them. Mountain slopes are not to be trusted. Nothing is stationary or inert – on closer inspection what you see makes your flesh creep, for the long shadows thrown by the stones seem to be directly linked to a rush of panic and acceleration. The surface of the rocks loses its massiveness, the ground is transformed into pure velocity and the speed of the falling scree mocks your steps.

    Just as Queiroz mistrusts the naked eye, he also wary of the conventional frames of visual reference and their customary classifications. In lieu of the vanishing point or viewpoint perspective he chooses the section. This is where physical, emotional, metaphorical reference or articulation can take place. Sensations perceived by skin and the composition of things are both driven to the extreme. Yet, following the logic of Queiroz’s pictorial approach the act of drawing has a merely attributive function: ‘A drawing lacks skin. It is where things converge, it is the moment of their encounter. Drawing no longer has anything to do with the sensations felt by the skin. Language separates things into different categories – here a beach, there a plant, a shadow or a rock – whereas a drawn line links them up and makes everything flow. Hence a shadow turns into a mountain which turns into a plant which turns into a stone which turns into a patch of light…’ Similar to his paintings, the drawings wrench our culturally familiar way of seeing ‘landscape’ away from conventions: beaches appear to be fathomless and barely discernible from a fata morgana. Things washed up on the shore, a stone maybe, or some bamboo plant, no longer offer a sense of orientation, but instead play confusing visual puzzles with the lines of the surf and the horizon. There are drawings which are imbued with a sense of ecstasy, with something airily ephemeral – as if the image had barely been touched.

    In this new cycle of work Queiroz shows with hitherto seldom achieved radicalism that his painting in nature has broken with the conventions of colour composition (compare with Cézanne’s assertion, ‘peindre, c’est enregistrer ses sensations colorées’), replacing them instead with haptic painting. His approach is similar to the definition of space proposed by Deleuze in his differentiation between ‘espace strié’ (partitioned space) and ‘espace lisse’ (open space); the first notion describes a geometrically and optically calibrated space, the second denotes space as defined by events. Haptic perception, Deleuze argues, relies less on the form assumed by some material phenomenon than on the energies and symptoms signalled by such matter. It concerns a ‘spatium intense’ rather than a spatial expanse. It is about the tension generated within a space rather than its physical dimensions. Space charged with tension is determined by dynamic forces such as wind or sound, like the hurtling echo unleashed when a huge sheet of ice cracks or the purring whirr of wind as it eddies across vast sand dunes. Queiroz refuses to choose one form of perception in preference to another. Each time he exposes himself to nature he reopens an intense dialogue as if he were subjecting himself to this adventure for the very first time. He is one of those artists who pose the simplest of questions – for which there can be no answer. Just as others ask, ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Where am I?’, all he wishes to learn is, ‘What is it?’ He persistently refuses to accept the kinds of ‘conceptual bridges’ and ‘paths of escape’ we have grown used to as a means of muddling through reality: ‘Depicting the outer world interests me just as little as translating some inner world – I do not carry an ‘inner landscape’ around with me. Instead, what really interests me is the occurrence of things as events, of what is actually there. I do not govern nature or turn it into landscape but, yes, of course I play a dominant role in how these events are related. Rather than putting distance between me and the world, my drawing participates in the world as an equivalent, as a third being so to speak.’

    The dragoeiro tree contains a blood-red sap called ‘sangue de drago’. Queiroz bleeds out some of this sap, mixes it with alcohol and draws with it. In the exhibition an entire room is papered edge to edge with these unframed sheets. If you enter this room unawares it is likely to give you a severe shock. Not because of the blood-red drawings, but by being brought face-to-face with the immediacy with which material and motif are linked. A nomad’s authenticity is not constituted merely by the life he spends in the great in-between as he oscillates between various pastures, nor simply by the fact that he is constantly passing through rather than occupying territory. Rather, the defining feature of the nomad is above all that he lives in his work; in other words, he lives off the products of the animals that he keeps, he inhabits the wool that they give him. Which means that the nomad’s second skin is nothing other than his work. In the same vein, in addition to his paintings, drawings also constitute ‘the painter’s second skin’. For in a heightened sense these drawings offer evidence of a deliberate approach, the decision to be in nature rather than just standing in front of nature, an attitude that forms the basis of all Queiroz’s works. What this suggests is the preference for a different way of seeing as opposed to appropriation: Queiroz proves that the eye cannot conceivably be located out on the margin of the field of vision. His painting sharpens our awareness for a ‘seeing skin’, that ‘fabric of sensuality’ which ‘seals the body, covers it and opens it up for the senses’. The painter gives his skin for an awareness that brings about an intense experience of ‘being-in-the-world’. This has nothing to do with ‘imitating’ nature, but with encountering the completely Other that is nature. This is not a question of fathoming its laws but about examining one’s own capacity to perceive the Other. ‘In all these (formalistic) notions of artistic creativity, the human spirit and nature are contrasted in all the varied manifestations of their existence and life. Imitation,’ Max Raphael writes in his analysis of Cézanne, ‘masks the distance and the opposition between them; it thereby hampers any analysis of and insight into the historically changing methods through which they correspond, intermingle and achieve a unity, and at the same time ultimately eliminates the singularity and autonomy of the very object that embodies the result of their mutual interaction – the work of art.’ Today, when João Queiroz paints (in oils or watercolours) or draws nature’s ‘precipitous edges’, people on all sides respond with surprise and ask about nature – or even landscape – and run the danger of forgetting about the unmistakable autonomy of these images. His works could prompt us to think of Nietzsche, who claimed, ‘There is no truth for truth’s sake alone’. There is no picture for the picture’s sake alone: this is the radical view with which Queiroz approaches the canvas.

    In essence, however, these issues shift his painting onto ontological terrain, for surely, are we not all haunted by the spectre of actually becoming the very mask that each of us has invented for ourselves? The earth’s crust is between 25 and 40 kilometres thick. Madeira is just another piece of unsettling evidence that we live our lives on nothing sturdier than a frail cover. During his stay there João Queiroz painted not only the island but also a heightened awareness for the fragility of our ‘dereliction’. Yet we encounter his pictures as alien beings that refuse to be appropriated. To expose oneself to his works means little less than a willingness to shed one’s own skin.

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