THE STUBBORNNESS OF THE GRID

 

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Paulo Venancio Filho, 2018

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We are facing a painting that doesn’t engage in superficialities so present in a certain present-day painting, that is, so to speak, a painting that puts aside and withdraws from Painting. It still conserves the canvas, the chassis, the surface, but this surface is just a “screen”, maybe a “monitor” like so many others, in which, consequently, “figures” come and go, without remaining there and without entrenching themselves, and then, go someplace else, sliding from surface to surface. If there’s an effect here, an “artifice”, it’s the one of investing the possible wisdom of painting in a contemporary “speech”. 

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It projects itself outwards, imposing a certain magnificence, sumptuousness even, but is trapped there, stuck there, there’s no way of taking it out of there, from that place, from inside the canvas. That’s it’s irremovable place that takes on as if it where the highest, most noble and solemn place. The magnificence and sumptuousness that it possesses would be artificial, ridiculous even, anachronistic. That’s why they must transmute into unlikely and virtuous waste, debris, worthless objects; in an exquisite and attractive monster. There lies a figure by determination of being a painting and by an insistence in painting it, a necessary stubbornness. It’s a painting whose impact is lengthy, slow, it pulls us and drags us towards the, sticky, viscous, without letting go of us. It wants to grasp us; that’s probably the reason why it’s long “tentacles”, large tortuous brush strokes, a smooth and continuous dripping of a preciosity little seen nowadays, like ties thrown of the canvas to bind the spectator. A preciosity that doesn’t remit to anything, without nostalgia or aplomb, but simply by painting, can still be accomplished. That’s all, without wanting to recover anything or everything but still wanting to. To be a fact of a still possible making, and that’s it.

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I see in this painting a history of thirty years or more so, a long and continuous conflict with the grid. And it still resists the whiff of post-modernity, like the one that distorts itself in the wind, but still is and will be a rectangle. Because in the beginning it was the grid. Nothing but the grid and the artist’s stubbornness. And that’s how it was for a long time. A grid that went forward in the surface and silenced inside the surface. It hid in the darkness, in the darkest place and disappeared in the purity of white. Without ever disappearing. It was a silent and meticulous dispute with the grid. Repeated again and again, stubbornly repeated, like an obsession. 

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Today, we are possibly talking about a grid/graffiti. A graffiti without the fluid lightness of the spray, but with a paint tired and exhausted from tradition still trying to fixate its last glow, getting involved with the same arm gesture that draws on the wall as much as on the canvas. One with the urgency of the repeated act, the other with the weight of the paint. A graffiti with the total density of the painting, lingering. With the painting putting its virtuosity in turnarounds, in somersaults and tumbles that can’t be predicted, just like a negative sum; more is less, less is more. Assemblage, cluster of pictorial scraps, and in the end, we don’t know what was added and taken, and it doesn’t matter: the pictorial tangle has won. Relentlessly, this figure with its tentacles unfolds in others, an endless chase, like a huge plant that thrives and attracts all the forces to itself. Tentacles replace tentacles like lizard tails. 

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It’s a painting that excites and tires. Tires and excites. Repetitive to endless exhaustion. Tumultuous, turbulent, entirely fixed on the matter, on the body of the paint itself. It wants to get out, exteriorize itself, exit the canvas and is nonetheless irretrievably stuck to the canvas. It projects itself; imposing and open like graffiti and stuck to the paint, to the canvas, to the chassis like few are. The pictorial matter wants to suck, absorb the glance in a lasting gaze. 

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I also see the undefined tones of the colors of analytic cubism revisited and enlightened, for it’s as if light was given to these colors and, at the same time examined by a magnifying glass. And shredded, butchered in juxtaposed pieces — a collage painting, or even better, a fake trompe l’oeil collage painting. There lies an abrasive summer sunset that vanishes in the horizon. Below is a centennial peeled and shiny wall. The smooth surface and the little holes of the travertine marble. The sinuous, greasy hair of a Courbet woman. A pike position leap by Sponge Bob. Pictorial passages of a perfectly adjusted disarticulation. But it is needed, just as a scientist with his equipment, slowly distinguish these disguised specimens in this heavy paint painting, necessarily heavy. 

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The digital origin of these images is curious, they are processed and reprocessed in several sheets of paper unloaded from the printer, they serve as “sketches” or “studies” by continuously doing and redoing, experimenting their possibilities, its anxious incompleteness before the canvas. And still it is necessary to put a full stop to it; with the brush, the paint, the canvas. Thus, the brush covers the whole canvas in large, fluid, expansive, dense gestures, and the pleasure of this gesture is perceived, felt, just as if praising the nobility, the eloquent greatness desired by the painting. On the other hand, the annoyance of the scratch, the center of the canvas blocked by dragged rectangles of paint, like a persistent, fruitless, inoperative corrective saying “no”. So, the anticipated gesture of erasing everything to start over is already there, on the canvas; the previous and intimidating warning that everything can go wrong. The painting is made under this pressure; it contains the evidences of all or nothing.

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The structure of the painting varies very little, colors and forms repeat themselves. Is it the same painting? Are there versions? Where did such an obsessive and repetitive “figure” come from? What does it want to prove? To achieve the unlikely and last better version of all. But which one?

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The “figure” repeats itself obsessively, it blooms and grows in a combative attitude. What is there to do if not reactivate the old ring of the studio, the patient exercise of the strokes and wriggles of the brush? Stubborn, like one of these songs that stick to the mind and won’t leave you, it comes back without us even realizing, like a chewed gum expands and contracts before being spit out. Object or detritus; undefinable. We perceive the impatience as an exercise or exasperation studies, long brush strokes drag the paint through long paths that we follow a bit astonished; where do they go? Virtuously distorted, calculatedly unsteadily, ironic, very ironic. To laugh then? After following them through opposite to and from motions, contradictory, inconclusive, they even bump into the frontal blockage of the sinuous movement of the brush strokes, almost a collage fixated on the canvas, the mass of paint pressed, crushed, dragged, between fluidity and paralysis.

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This so openly distinct and languorous painting, calculated and mismatched, ironic and portentous, is the result of the long and hard gestation of a “grid”, daughter of that mother Grid, that adventured through the wretched paths of present time and has turned back, confident, to itself, to the canvas, to the paint, to the brush.

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