The Artist in his labyrinth.
“Assi como em todas cousas humanas ha continua mudança
& alteraçaõ, assi he tambem nas lingoagès. E o que parecia increivel,
tambem isto estaa subjecto ao arbitrio da fortuna”
“H Não he letra, mais que na figura. Mas he hua
aspiraçaõ ou assopro, com que se pronunciaõ as
letras, a que se ajunta”
(Duarte Nunes de Leão, 1606)1
My writing (drawing, painting) is hard to understand. But God has is
own manners and maybe he will help me in this humble reproduction.
Hopeful my texts, has the ones of Saint John which are difficult to
read, maybe also be easy to love”2.
“In the beginning the Word already existed” John 1: 1).
And if in the beginning of the principle, before the word already existed the
sign, and if before the sign, the form, and if before the form, the gesture, and if before
the gesture, the idea.
It is in this flaw that the “principle of everything” mediates and the beginning of
the existence of that one “that is the Word” that inhabits the mystery (in the direction of
occult to the look not initiated) of the creation, in its different assertions. Raquel
Henriques Da Silva says when she writes “to write the painting” or “to paint the
writing” is a timeless exercise [3]and João Miguel Fernandes Jorge when he affirms that
“the letters of the alphabets in the painting of João Vieira have a parallel force to the
one of the sacred rocks. They propagate the Homes, the Genies and the
Guardianships”[4]. It demonstrates it proper João Vieira, in the new stained-glass
window that made for the Sé de Vila Real in 2002, when choosing, for the ones of the
(clerestório) of that Romanic cathedral, the words of the beginning of the second Gospel
of Saint John - “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God”[5].- deconstructing and reinventing the association of the letters that
form
them:
[NOP/
KIDNEY/CIP]
[IOE/RAO/VER]
[BOE/OVE/RBO]
[AGE/WITH/GAVE] [SEO/ TO SEE/BO] [AGE/OF/US][6].
The mystery of creation is in this kind of tautological ritual that is the Art, from
which humankind comes formulating, from generation to generation, new answers for
the same questions on the condition of its existence. It is in the constant exercise of this
mystery that consolidates the inquietude and the experimentalism that the majority of
the authors recognizes as a permanent characteristic of João Vieira’s workmanship [7]. It
is clear wants since soon in the intention, in the ancestor of its happenings and of its
performances of the initial years of 1970 (Expansões, 1971; Incorporal I, 1972), either
when it convokes to recreate the painters of the past - Nuno Gonçalves (The Panels
and Ecce Homo, 1987), Vasco Grain (They are Peter, the other and They are Peter,
proper it, 1994), Dürer in house of Marta (1994), Velásquez (1991), Eduardo Viana
(Viana, 1991), Francisco of Holland or the Matisse that gave mote to the present
exposition -, he deconstructs over all when or elaborates associations with words and
phrases to explore, and not to verify (it is basic to distinguish it in these days of “aftermodernity”), the limits of the painting. In this context, the letter that precedes the Verb
or the Word, exactly in its Biblical meaning, is the substance that supports the existence.
In the definition of Hélder Macedo, the letters are the visual forms of the set of
visual forms that is the alphabet. It wants to say, according to the author, that each letter
by itself nothing means and that the alphabet is a set of a non-significant
assemblage. When only combined ones with the others they are capable to mean
everything what it has or it can have more what does not have nor can have [8]. They fix
the transitory one, they break up the infinite, they nominate the non-nominated, they
impose time to the eternity and they incorporate what does not have body [9]. Soon, as all
the things, human beings, are circumstantial. João Vieira has left of this estimated, the
one that we cannot escape as cultural beings, historical and geographic that we are, to
explore the conceptual and graphical possibilities of the letters and the texts, in its
duplicity of significant signs and, making to act its/our look on the alphabet, the word,
the poem, the citation. From there in them not to seem that its letters completely are
taken out of a mould of its narrative function
[10].
We understand them as, seminal
entities, atoms polyhedral that combine themselves to form substance myriads, the
plurality of the world, of which the narrative is, while code, one of the manifestations,
and not less important. They are intermediate entities, allowing to the spectator, while
recognizable elements, to follow the painter in its creative and recombined game. It is
not by chance that Duarte Nunes de Leão, in century XVII, said “letter of I bequeath,
legis, and of to iter, that it wants to say way: because he opens way what Lee”[11]; or
what he is seen, in João Vieira, we say we.
Also in them it does not seem to make sensible to fit the letters of João Vieira in
the supposed controversy between figuration and abstraction, that if it transformed, with
the ticket of the time, in a problem of the theoretician-critical categorization. Even as
recognizable forms, graphical signals that become visible the sounds, the letters are
figurative. Because they withhold the capacity to be transfigured in not signs, in its
possible visual qualities of chromatic spots, forms, light and space, in replacements and
reconfigurations that multiply the images, the letters are simultaneously abstract. The
words (groupings of letters) withhold this same pair quality, metaphysics, to configure
what he is non-shaped when they nominate it, assuming in the graphic the visibility of
what it is not seen; and to become abstract the empirical realities when they substitute
them, assigning them, for concepts. Reason for which it brings the words for its painting
in heavy phrases of meaning, dense as its spot (Eros, Utopia, Soul e Link, all
workmanships of 2008, e Ether of 2007), that they can go until the a poetical quotation
(Only, 2008) or Biblical one, as we point out initially. Recognized, they open a new
dimension to the interpretation of the painting. Ignored, they do not modify the plastic
nature of the workmanship.
In truth, the letters of João Vieira are simply painting, for the virtue to
congregate the two basic dimensions of the Art: of the sensible, universal and timeless
perception, and of the cultural, identity and cultural interpretation. Association that João
Vieira makes explicit e intentionally, when making it, evokes all the last artistic creation
(and we could here retake the subject of the recreations) and augurs the future one, gifts
in the repetition and the elimination, in the dense flicks, “in fat and glamorous
substance, scratched out, to the flower of the ink, for more letters and (…)”[12], in
leaving vestiges of the passage of the hand, of the gesture to paint, mark of the
temporality of the act that remembers the prehistoric painting, origin for there of the
origin, and that it points with respect to the concepts of the non-started and unfinished,
for the continuous search, that points stops beyond the painting, for the idea of that the
work of art does not have principle nor end, as the Word or the Verb.
When painting Dance e Music from Matisse, João Vieira puts letters in the place
of bodies (he had already dressed the bodies with letters), suspended on deep whites, on
or untied, chained in way the one that if does not leave to read DANCE and MUSIC,
realities that also consist in codes by means of the combination of movements or
sounds. Thus, they can be what they are for its conventional reading, the vocalizations
of a concept that nominates a share - “sequence of steps, of corporal movements,
executed generally to the sound of music for one or some people, according to an art,
technique or specific cultural code”[13] (it dances) or “art to conjugate sounds of melody
form and in accordance with determined rules, capable to state or to awake emotions
and to evoke certain realities”[14] (music). Or simply the visibility of signs - D, N, c, M,
U, S, I, C. Or still the figurative delineation of the plastic substance that it of the body.
Or even, and finally, the possibility to be a thousand and one distinct codes, from a
thousand and one new variants of configuration or association that did not exist until
starting to exist. What he means is that we will not be in such a way before a release
semiotics exercise, as Vieira has already said himself concerning to João’s painting, but
to explore it until its limits, until if exceeding for something new. From there its
personal taste for the authors joint, those that reinvent the codes of the visibility and the
language.
They are concretions of these infinite possibilities that João Vieira in the ones of
seeing in the “penetrate”, of richest and complex, formal and chromatically, to the most
purified and graphical, for which if it appropriates again of Matisse, of its clippings,
gluing, lithography’s and engravings, fruits of an artistic passage that passed for varied
registers and supports. To structuralize the “penetrate” as a labyrinth, for where the
spectator is invited to enter for its proper ways, contamination of other artistic
experiences of João Vieira, the stage and the performance, shows solution to it more
logical as physical and experimental synthesis of the complexity and the multiplicity of
combinations that the act of the creation can imply, of that is impossible to the spectator
having a full conscience. Visa of the exterior, a labyrinth perfectly is delimited, in the
interior, the number of the possible passages return-in the infinite.
The labyrinth, however, is also the space of the game, that implies the pleasure
of the discovery and the allotment, because all the art is a deeper form of discovery and
allotment of our feelings and thoughts[15]. For the playful one, it discloses the illusion of
the evidences, that conditional for are only determined circumstances. Let us finish
appealing to Matisse’s words: “The roll-play of the artist, as well as the one of the
scientist, consists of apprehending current truths that constantly have been repeated, but
for it they will assume a character of newness and they will become its in the day where
it to perceive the direction deepest of them. If the aeronautical engineers had to present
its research, to explain as they had been able to leave the land and if to launch in the
space, would simply give the confirmation of very elementary principles of physics, that
other less happy inventors had neglected”[16].
Paulo Simões Rodrigues
[1]
Duarte Nunes de LEÃO - Origin, and Orthographia of the Lingoa Portugueza. Lisbon: Typgraphia of
the Panorama, 1864, P. 1 and 111.
[2]
João VIEIRA - “Of the Author”. João Vieira. Stained-glass windows of the Church of Is Domingos.
Sé de Vila Real. Lisbon: Portuguese institute of the Architectural Patrimony, Ministry of the Culture,
2003, P. 62.
[3]
Raquel Henriques Da Silva - “João Vieira: of the letters to the bodies”. João Vieira. Bodies of Letters.
Port: Wing, Foundation of Serralves, 2002, P. 68.
[4]
João Miguel Fernandes JORGE - “Letters”. João Vieira. Passages 1960-2001. s.l., Publishing ACD,
2001, P. 9.
[5]
I open this text with the same quotation of the Gospel according to S. John. I used, intentionally, a
more recent translation of the Holy Writs, of the edited one for the Biblical Diffusing in 1993, known as
Bible of the Franciscanos Capuchinhos, that much modifies the text.
[6]
João VIEIRA - “Of the Author”. João Vieira. Stained-glass windows of the Church of Sé Domingos Sé
de Vila Real.. Lisbon: Portuguese institute of the Architectural Patrimony, Ministry of the Culture, 2003,
P. 61, 64 and 65.
[7]
João FERNANDES - “the letter and the body in João Vieira’s workmanship”. João Vieira. Bodies of
Letters. Port: Wing, Foundation of Serralves, 2002, P. 21.
[8]
Hélder MACEDO - “Forms to read”. João Vieira. Bodies of Letters. Port: Wing, Foundation of
Serralves, 2002, P. 46.
[9]
Emília FERREIRA - “alive Eye and fast hand”. João Comes. Not-painting. Almada: House of the
Fence, 2008, P. 10.
[10]
Emília FERREIRA - alive Eye and fast hand”. João Comes. Not-painting. Almada: House of the
Fence, 2008, P. 11.
[11]
Duarte Nunes de LEÃO - Origin, and Orthographia of the Lingoa Portugueza. Lisbon: Typgraphia of
the Panorama, 1864, P. 102.
[12]
Raquel Henriques Da Silva - “João Vieira: of the letters to the bodies”. João Vieira. Bodies of Letters.
Port: Wing, Foundation of Serralves, 2002, P. 68 (catalogue of the exposition).
[13]
Dictionary of the Portuguese Language Contemporary of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, Lisbon,
Editorial Verb, 2001 (I volume), P. 1058.
[14]
Dictionary of the Portuguese Language Contemporary of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, Lisbon,
Editorial Verb, 2001 (II volume), P. 2556.
[15]
Raquel Henriques Da Silva - “João Vieira: of the letters to the bodies”. João Vieira. Bodies of Letters.
Port: Wing, Foundation of Serralves, 2002, P. 66 (catalogue of the exposition); Emília FERREIRA - P.
10.
[16]
Henri Matisse - “Notes of a painter”. Henri Matisse. Writings and reflections on art. São Paulo:
Cosac Naify, 2007, P. 49.