o instante do mundo
JOÃO QUEIROZ | JOSÉ LOURENÇO | CATARINA BRANCO | ISABEL MADUREIRA ANDRADE
‘To think is to experience (…)’ [1] says Merleau-Ponty in one of the first pages of his reflection on the undeniable, fair and consequent involvement of the painter’s physical body in the process of producing a painting. In an attempt to deconstruct the phenomenon of observation and its translation into the realm of painting, the philosopher emphasises the importance of the perceptual process as something that goes beyond the visual dimension to become allied with a dimension of presence. The painter’s body present on site allows him to simultaneously achieve the condition of observer and actor. To be there is to participate, so to be there is to build. Constructing thought, thinking painting.
In a reflection on Cézanne’s landscape practice (and therefore his thinking in painting, his construction), Merleau-Ponty states that ‘the world is made of the same upholstery as the body (…) vision starts from or is made in the midst of things, where a visible is seen (…)’ [2] and further on he states that ‘the eye sees the world, and what the world lacks in order to be a picture, and what the picture lacks in order to be itself (…)’. [3]
We could say, considering Merleau-Ponty’s reflection, that thinking painting is therefore producing reality. More than constructing or registering, through the codes of representation, a certain vision of reality, we would say that the painter goes beyond his condition as a perceptive vehicle to assume a condition that generates new layers of reality. It is also in this sense that we like to think of landscape as a model of representation, embracing it as a polysemic concept that results from the social, philosophical, and cultural understanding produced from (and with) reality. Rather than capturing an instant of the world, landscape painting seems to us to be a new instant in the world.
The exhibition that is now being presented, marking the third moment in the commemorative cycle of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Galeria Fonseca Macedo, seems to be the result of a happy encounter among the works of four Portuguese painters who share this awareness of their place. Conceiving paintings that are based on a relational matrix with nature or the natural outside world (let’s broadly refer to them as landscapes), they seek an idiosyncratic positioning from this place of implication and present themselves to us as bearers of responsibility for sharing these new moments in the world.
Catarina Branco (Ponta Delgada, 1974), whose work challenges disciplinary boundaries, taking painting (and its three-dimensional developments) as her broad field of exploration, presents a set of paintings produced from the vivid and present relationship she establishes with her own garden on the island of São Miguel. Maintaining her interest in botany and the decorative and symbolic, but also colourful and ecological, nature of plants, and particularly flowers (which have been present in her work for a long time), the artist reaffirms the presence of the body in this relationship with nature, transporting it in a playful way to the relationship with the artistic materials themselves.
José Lourenço (Lisbon, 1975), maintaining his recognisable record, presents a set of new paintings on paper based on an eminently graphic, rigorous language of flat colours and precise contours. The impressive relationship he has established with the very rich nature of the Azores, during his most recent trip to the archipelago, has allowed him to create a set of paintings that are strongly atmospheric, but strangely silent. There seems to be a stillness implicit in these images that contrasts precisely with our memory of the vivid, blazing nature of these territories, lending them a disconcerting strangeness and artificiality.
Heir to a tradition close to abstraction and its various declinations, Isabel Madureira Andrade (Ponta Delgada, 1991) has been developing a style of painting that is mainly based on a geometric matrix, creating complex paintings that challenge the viewer’s gaze. The use of less conventional processes of application, enlargement, repetition and elision in the production of her paintings gives her work an appearance close to graphic or photographic printing, valuing the revelatory moment in the encounter with the image and understanding the disciplinary field of painting as a territory of permanent exploration. The group of small and medium-sized works in this exhibition reaffirms her interest in abstraction but signals an attempt to get closer to the territory of these images in a more intuitive and direct approach. Bringing us closer to the thought of a relationship with nature, they seem to function as an invitation to dive into caves, into the depths of the earth or into the densest night skies.
The vast research that João Queiroz (Lisbon, 1957) has been persistently developing concerns what we might call the pictorial event. That special territory where, ‘lending his body to the world, the painter transmutes the world into painting’. [4] At the same time as he presents us with small fragments of nature with the apparent certainty of someone who has mastered all its secrets, the artist makes visible the mechanisms of his own thinking and conceptual project.
The set of ten watercolour paintings conceived for the exhibition are rich exercises in visual exploration and act as formidable challenges to our acuity and attention. As they are not portraits of places, but landscapes – constructions, fictions, images, in other words, the result of thought becoming painting – they seem to bear witness to the enigma that Merleau-Ponty speaks of when he says that in the process of creating a painting, it ‘does not seek the exterior of the movement (of things) but its secret ciphers.’ [5]
Ana Anacleto
December 2024
[1] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, in “O Olho e o Espírito”, Nova Veja, Pontinha, 2023, p. 14.
[2] Idem, p.21.
[3] Idem, p.25.
[4] Idem, p.19.
[5] Idem, p.64.