PAINTING AS A NOUM

​

Guilherme Bueno, 2012

​

​

One of the biggest problems we encounter when discussing the current state of painting consists of shifting from a generalizing analysis to an objective viewpoint. Objective, to be read here in the literal sense of the word. Therefore, speaking of painting in its material sense is not restricted to an approach rooted in the still-necessary critical questioning of the boundary between modernity and post-modernity, the touchstone of which, as a rule, has been to challenge the striking metalinguistic character of 20th century production. Rather, when we make use of this “material objectivity” of painting today we emphasize something elementary yet important to say — it’s condition can only be ascertained upon direct contact with an oeuvre and an inquiry into our experience that the works provoke. In a nutshell, Painting fortunately still depends on paintings to be less fixated on the transcendental search for its definition than broadening its repertoire of works.  

​

This foreword is particularly relevant to understanding the foundations of Paulo Laport’s art. Our initial impression, intriguing in itself, is that of how modern his paintings look in his methodical perspective of the constitutive physical terms, even when purposefully placed at their limit. Let us consider one example: what is the boundary that separates objectivity and subjectivity when dealing with the notion of scale? Such notion is actually decisive insofar as it is installed in the work on three axes: the verticality of the canvas, the thickness of its chassis and of its layers of paint, thus creating a thick painting mural and the need to breathe when the works are fitted to the architectonic space. However, returning to the problem, the fact is that these paintings, although passing for a modern oeuvre, are emphatically contemporary. That might be a minor issue here, considering the relative indifference, or perhaps even discretion, in being tied to classifications of such order. Nonetheless, this unstable boundary is active in its capacity to tear up each component of the pictorial field, once again exposing here the general categories that structured an auto-referential practice of certain modern painting to their ordinary test. Consider again the projection of the chassis and the extension of the painted plane to the sides: they simultaneously emulate and break from both the centripetal organization of the painting’s elements and the frontality that erstwhile underlay the famous (and now infamous) planarity. This frontal plane, however, is not resolved due merely to lateral displacement; it is also placed in friction against itself — the successive layers turn the support almost into a floor on which the paint is embedded. It would be valid to technically describe these works as “painting on painting” (as we usually talk of oil on canvas, oil on paper etc.), also in virtue of the other implicit meanings; painting that speaks about and is made on its own history. Ironically, this could actually be the only quasi-metaphor (I add quasi to make it clear that operating on history is neither incorporeal nor foreign to the concrete world) at stake.

​

The singular feature of note is that of painting being emphasized as a noun. In effect, this signals its difference compared to modern painting, which rejected allegories, and surreptitiously resorted to adjectives: it needed to be abstract, expressive, expressionist, concrete, lyrical, essentialist, and whatever else it wanted. It ended up resorting to other vehicles to paradoxically demonstrate its autonomy. In Paulo’s works everything is contained precisely to “calibrate” the presence of the painting: the trajectory of the brush and of the paint on the canvas cannot be called gestural or austere; it is not neutral, rather it is anti-expressive. The resulting mesh is not designed, but to call it spontaneous would be to commit the negligence of looking for, outside the geometry, an inconvenient emotiveness in it. That same mesh actually reinforces the self-unfolding relationship between the painting and the space that it simultaneously occupies and founds. Speaking freely to Newman (the zip) and Mondrian (not only the grid, but the alignment of the brush strokes with the perpendicular mesh of the canvas), it mediates the arrangement of one plane over another, citing its support in the painting. After all, this clash is felt at every instant here — considering that these paintings are not completed immediately, but rather by the comings and goings of the pictorial strands, whose viscosity or drying creates advances and retreats of colouration, light and articulation within the painting. This painting of a plane only truly achieves this condition after arduous and almost interminable sessions which always involve the threat of any slight distraction putting everything to waste. This slow painting, in which respect is contradictory to the fast-moving modern world, requests of us a perception that I would not call introspective (which would make it sound romantic), but rather immersive (i.e., it requires accurate attention under prolonged exposition). And the greyish glow, on account of all this, forms the axis of these works.

​

The greyish tone is to Paulo’s painting what blue is to Cézanne. This arises from the way in which the colour breaks its enclosure (as even when the local colour was abolished in impressionism, it still spread out in an homogenous and, to a certain extent, segmented manner), creating an “atmosphere” in the painting where a given colouration permeates throughout, even enabling a redistribution of weight and hierarchy among the parts and between the figure and the background. To speak of greyish here, however, is almost to resort to a conventional vocabulary merely to introduce the eye to the field to be investigated. For at every point there are reverberations of countless other colours crossing the strata of the painting, leaving us questioning whether colour really exists in these paintings. To examine this problem in more detail, we can call on Pollock, Seurat, Matisse and Albers (and Newman again) to join this dialogue. Pollock, for he, to a certain extent, reconfigured and updated the colour vs. colouration confrontation both of Cézanne and of analytic cubism (as well as opening the way for painting without design, determined in its own constitutive process); Seurat for colour obtained through fragmentation. And finally, the trio of Matisse, Albers and Newman, on account of this new quality assumed by colour in 20th century art. In all three, colour not only gains autonomy, but also breaks the tonal scheme (in Matisse with the admission of black as a colour, previously signalled by Courbet and Franz Hals, for example) and with Newman in the corporeal dimension colour attains. Obviously citing three icons of painting may sound pretentious here, or at least disconcerting, however it is precisely this almost immobilizing weight of an eloquent past that compels the persistence of artwork, which must overcome zealous respect and create before it strategies of conservation, renunciation, deviation or invention. To place this in concrete terms in relation to Paulo’s paintings, it seems essential to understand the value of this greyish not only as faithful to the colour vs. colouration antithesis, but also in the very hypothesis of establishing grey as a colour, perhaps without even excluding its survival as a tone. In other words, the grey/greyish here would be the way out, the decisive ultimatum for the enigma of how to speak of painting without expunging colour, yet not allowing its sensuality to divert the attention to everything else that painting also is. The supposed neutrality of the grey (and its tonal value has always been exploited in this regard) was to produce gradual intermediations between elements of painting, thus creating harmony between the part and the whole. Thus, to a certain extent it “tempered” the degree of depth and projection of the painting in relation to the internal space of the canvas and that other space which should (or should appear to) jump out from it; in general terms this was suggested in the “relief” structure of renaissance painting, for example. The matter of grey-based adjustment was therefore to reconcile the emphatic corporeality of the white with the deep retreats suggested by the black, thus creating intermediary planes. In the case of Paulo’s greyish, this colour-tone suitably complements the break from the classic dualities of colour vs. tone and colour vs. drawing, as it simultaneously fuses them (witness how his paintings, once again like Pollock, have no design) and, if we consider again the proposal of a painting which relies on itself as its support, we can see that this greyish almost literally places (even in its corporeal constitution) this adjustment of planes and luminosities that control the whole piece. It does not describe a mesh, the mesh is made within. Furthermore, still in relation to its corporeal aspect which, to reiterate, is at once literal and autonomous (as at times it takes on the support almost as a circumstance on which the painting “rests”), it also constitutes a luminosity that, while at first glance depends on external rays of light, it equally stores the eruption of an internal luminosity, which indeed comes from within and from behind the pictorial plane closest to jumping out. Attempting to explain this in other words, there is a familiarity with Albers’ treatment of colour, the final, most visible layer of which shone as a result of the numerous layers below that often closed, blocked, or at least regulated the light coefficient emitted by the canvas (somewhat perceptible in the German artist’s studies). Granting this new statute to grey has yet another meaning. If we think of it as an equation, the enigma of a colour that is spatialized without resorting to latent sensuality. Grey is the quintessential neutral colour. Hence it appears in these paintings as a non-emotive colour, a colour-non-colour, whose unusual “inexpressiveness” ends up now taken by indifference, now serving as a point of support and “rest” for other intense zones. It seems to just expel colour from the painting, as if removing what little the painting still holds of “accident”. However, this discreet and solidary colour that joins the other parts that together form the painting, only works precisely when prolonged perception is demanded as mentioned above, dissatisfied by the stereotypes of miraculous “immediate” perception or of falsely mulled over — and somewhat theatrical — affectation of the pretentious expert. There is something of a request for a time that, while not new, is another on behalf of the spectator. The establishment of grey as a colour could signal, in terms of its minimal and contained qualities, the affluence of a new hypothesis for painting. And as an hypothesis, it needs to be tested and ascertained. In the next work to be initiated, painting by painting.

​

​

​