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A day's journey
I In wartime we should establish the meaning of a day's journey for the
simple talking about things, even about the things of art. The first days
of the struggle have now passed, but the corps of the called-up has not
yet committed itself to the dizziness of victory, with which defeat is
always covered. Beneath the dust of war nature is more nature, and the
landscape that attends it requests a puerile outline announced in a light
green; a tenuous sketch of grey, black mass that invades everything in
violent gushes of soot, charcoal, nacreous pitch. In wartime there is
an instant of silence, a sort of metallic precision that breaks out at
dawn. And then the men appear. The paleness of sleep is blended into a
sort of ceruse that, in advance, grants them the face of death; of a mixture
with the blood of combat. They move forward slowly. They crawl. When the
exploding of a bomb or another makes them lie on the ground they have
a strange rigidity, the appearance of statues. They look like marble and,
beneath the mask that defends them from gas, their faces, covered in a
layer of mud and dust, are burnt by the sun. One of these men has an owl
in one of his hands. A living owl. It came down in the desert of Asia,
coming from the distant Acropolis. It is one of those owls that sing at
night among the Doriccolumns of the Parthenon. Pallas Athena who descended
into the hands of the warrior; and he could only give her steel columns,
of twisted bars; a colonnade of epidemics, of thirst and of hunger. The
owl's eyes are very clear. The man's eyes are also liquid in this way.
Their gazes meet. They are, in the man and in the owl, the owners of a
mysterious, ancient and inexorable expression. A dry black vapour is fused
into the damp green of the grass and into the golden reflection of a horizon
of pain. Subtle signs of graphite, of Indian ink; and then the oil, holding
the wax, varnish that is confused with the din of the elements. A dense,
opaque silence involves the flatness of the drawing. And, rapidly, darkness
returns. It comes torn with lightning bolts, which are not those spasms
of light that the generation of man has become used to under the roof
of his house. The latter run through the bodies of a disquiet and of a
suffering that are made up of the waiting near the line of fire.
II The initial manner of this day's journey was not exactly like this.
Rui Vasconcelos and Paulo Brighenti were together in a little café
in the Largo da Graça square. One had arrived by tram and had brought
a large portfolio of drawings with him. The other had come from his nearby
studio, in one of those rows of terraces from the time of the First Republic
that still exist in Lisbon. One afternoon when I was present, they gave
me some photocopied sheets of Phaedrus. First pages. When Plato is going
to meet Socrates and Phaedrus and takes them off the round running alongside
the River Illissos and has them look for shade so they may sit down under
a soft breeze. Before they come to the meaning of the beautiful, Phaedrus
and Socrates will become lost in the description of Gorgons and Chimeras:
hybrid, frightful and fear-provoking figures. On the banks of the Illissos
they talk about the art of augurs and of paramos, those circles woven
by the gods around the static earth. As for Brighenti and Vasconcelos,
they sought, in that meeting to which I was invited, the simple figure
of a drawing. That is, of a guiding link for a general depiction that
might function in an energetic way and time. That link, that connection,
that drawing would have to be able to capture a perception of nature and,
therefore, able to provide them with the expression of a work. They sought
a "stating" that, in a simultaneous manner, would show, reveal
and would let one see and understand the determination of a guiding line
of clouds, of vegetation, of sea, of forms of land: things that hold up
a landscape and tie down the resonance and wholeness of its spatial circumstances
to the surface of the paper or wood. It seemed to me that they were looking
for a "tone", a sorrow, a line that would guide the brush, the
pencil, the gouge, the sliding of the wax over a field; over a territory
of imagined geography, only existing in the irrationality with which we
people the presence of our own voices. Apparent and chimeral voices, capable
of bordering the disappeared Illissos and not the Tagus "down there".
"A landscape" - they said to me, that time, as a conclusion
- "is a methodical withdrawal that has been prepared for a long time."
They wanted to tell me a lot more. That a landscape should transportalong
with it: ruins, burnt out settlements, cadavers, tanks and shot-down planes.
The physiognomy of a landscape is not something that should be described
through in a hurried decision. The struggle with the lie of the land and
with the vegetation does not allow it. In a landscape any sign that surprises
should reside in the hidden advance of someone going down step by step,
of someone who pushes aside the high foliage of a tree, in order to then
bring to the eye the transfiguration of more leaves, of more green or
of the darker tone ofclouds that rise up in the distance. Then there follows
the sweeping flight of a bird, as if the sky were cut through by its unexpectedly
metallic wings; then comes an insect, a chitinous shell like that of an
assault vehicle plunging into deep mud. But in Rui Vasconcelos's vegetable
covered ground, or in the dry stones and seawater that Brighenti preferred
to grant a brownish tone, there was only the invocation of the soft and
sweet whispering of rain. "Tranquil and harmonious illusion, as even
in a fish tank there are storms. "I think it was Paulo Brighenti
who said this.
III Brighenti's paintings, engravings and drawing organize the stain.
It invades the territory of the landscape and grants it, in the drawing
and in the engraving, the weight of a terribleness that may lead us to
some works carried out in the seventeenth century in Naples. I am thinking
of Salvator Rosa or in the parks and battles of the German artist Johann
Heinrich Schönfeld, who lived among the Neapolitans for many years.
The spirit of war runs through his works, from which there emerges a sorrow
that pours out figures and landscape. This is the meaning of the use of
the stain and of the sombre blacks of Brighenti. He himself seduced by
the Neapolitan light (the best reference for a dialogue with the weight
of the shade) and by a tradition of "caprices" and "ruins"
that are often confused, coming from the Italian space, with Castilian
and Andalusian painters. It is enough for us to think of Goya's "caprices".
Not of the critical aspect that they present, but of the involution of
the body of the stain and of the path that it takes from their preliminary
sketches to the final engravings. We may also find a similar path in the
passage from the
drawings to the soft varnish of Brighenti's engravings. A passage that
is not alien to the multiple works that Goya's caprices inspire among
twentieth century artists, as takes place in a long series of drawings
by Sigmar Polke, from 1984. Dialogue with early painting and wit contemporary
artists is a day's journey in itself. In Brighenti's work we may feel
a breaking out of not only the shadow of Vesuvius, but also of the pacifying
of the work of Tiepolo or Giovanni Bellini. (Or even, not to totally move
away from the seduction of the light of the south of Italy, of Abraham
Brueghel, who, having come from Antwerp, sought out the Neapolitan image
to die.) The dialogue with Tiepolo and Giovanni Bellini and with Brueghel's
landscape work lead to an indicator of the pictorial "stating"
and, in Brighenti's work, do not only contemplate the mediating of a thinking
of painting, but establish a very strong image of rest in his oils on
wood. Rest in disquiet, if we do not forget the monochrome paintings he
exhibited in 1988 in the Pedro Cera Gallery. Liquid landscapes, a sea
taken over by a brownish tone, nacreous mists or a bruised green are the
limpid elements that emerge in the painting, in marked contrast to the
evolving of the stain in the drawing and in the engraving. As if a golden
dust had been cast over them, these paintings give off a depiction of
meditated splendour.
IV "The following winter, the Athenians from Sicily undertook an
expedition in the company of their Greek allies and in the same winter
the Athenians purified Delos, in accordance with a certain oracle. Pisistratus,
the tyrant, had already carried out a purification, but not of all the
island, only the part visible from the Sanctuary. Now Delos was totally
purified, in the following manner: all the tombs on Delos were removed,
and it was forbidden to die or to be born on the island in the future"
(Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book III, Ch. 103 and 104).
It is this aspect of a day's journey, laden with a tendency that attempts
to go from light to darkness and, immediately afterwards, to act so that
the elements that remain in the greater darkness may share in the light
and be placed within a field of vision that is expressed through a veiling
and through a penumbra, which we will now pursue. It is this step on the
day's journey, if seen through the pages of Phaedrus, that will seem to
reach us in the fanciful irrationalism of Delic Apollo, that I wish to
grant to the performance of the work of Rui Vasconcelos. We may also here
invoke Brueghel, and we may even approach some moments of the work of
Sigmar Polke. As we may refer to much more recent works: to Thomas Demand's
digital images ("Hecke-Hedge", 1996), an iridescent explosion
of green leaves, intense and shown against a black background; or toGlen
Wilson ("Desert Fishing", 2000), an also digital image in which
there is the vertical veins of a cactus, marked by the harshness of geometrical
thorns. But the most correct (and certainly most efficient) approach would
be to liken Vasconcelos's mixed media works and, even, the encaustic,
to the idea (which is central to all of his work) that landscape is indeed
something strange on the earth. Something strange: a dangerous step on
the day's journey: a dialogue in which thinking on landscape is drawn
out and amplified to nature; and in which, very carefully, lest nature
itself might awake in the eruption of one of its most violent elements,
it rests; where it gently lay down the soft mantle of the (invented) landscape.
It is this rest that is common to Vasconcelos's drawing. A monologued
dialogue with drawing itself, with the fading of the colour and, above
all, with the slight puffs of grey that are released from the stain, from
the colouration of more grey that is the stain itself. But standardized
subdued signs are immediately spread. This is a choice carried out almost
by a hermetic "stating". Laden with measurements (that contain
the standardizing) and retain, under the appearance of an inevitability,
the sombre weight of a stamp. The reference of that "brand"
might be found in the geometry of Islamic or Tibetan drawing, or in the
vegetable geometricism that can be found in the Romanic and Gothic, in
pilasters, columns and columella. The very copying of this onto the parchment
support stresses this drawn method of stating, underlined in the drawing
in which a blue and gold liquefy the urban landscape and make vibrate
the relationship between the dome of St. Paul's in London and the Roman
Coliseum: landscape is, to tell the truth, something very strange on the
earth. And Dürer, who was also a designer of stamps, in the "written"
lament of his extremely fine ink, seems to be hinted at in the mobility
of this landscape.
V "In wartime" - Rui Vasconcelos told me - "art attenuates
its erudite vocation. And seems to be destined to clarify and deepen the
life of the spirit. Even when the sky is dark, heavy, and harsh, and is
turned into an iron atmosphere capable of crushing the sea and the plane.
We believe that all this happens in a far-off place, in a geography that
doesn't belong to us. This is a mistake: the hideout drawn on the vein
in the mountain, the pit in which death will soon explode, is taking right
next to us. The odour that implodes in our own veins is a living odour
and thus is that of a corpse." "In wartime " - says Paulo
Brighenti - "there is an instant that is confused with that of a
mass migration. Yesterday I approached a man, still a boy, probably a
Slav. I asked him some questions: whether he was hungry, thirsty or cold.
I insisted. He stared at me with cold, dark eyes. Then, irritated, he
tossed out a sentence, that I didn't understand, but which seemed to me
to be a denial. I offered him a cigarette. He took it indifferently. He
took two or three puffs and threw it to the ground, stamping on it. And
then, as if excusing himself for his insolence, he gave me such a strange
smile, laden with such humility that I would prefer to receive a gaze
of hatred."
VI In wartime, we have recourse to and approach the inspiration we traditionally
find in the language of the Scriptures. Perhaps for this very reason,
one of the final steps on this day's journey is a long visit to Joos van
Cleve, to Jan Gossart, to Van Reymerswaelle, to Jan Provost, to Bouts,
to Gérard David, to Van Aelst, to that splendid education of the
human kind provided by the Flemish in the Funchal Museum of Religious
Art.
November 2001
João Miguel Fernandes Jorge
