Before the Wall, Behind the Horizon

Lorenzo Mammì

 

At the end of the film The Truman Show, the protagonist discovers that his world is a huge television studio set and walks through an equally artificial storm to escape from it. He arrives at a horizon painted onto a wall the limits of which extend out of sight. Instinctively, I associate that scene with the one in Planet of the Apes, in which Charlton Heston comes across the ruins of the Statue of Liberty on a beach. Other times, other anxieties: in the 1968 film, the civilizing hero discovers that evolution coincides with self-destruction. Worse: that the disaster has already taken place, history has ended and it remains only to repeat it. In The Truman Show, the hero realizes that the world is appearance, that the infinity into which he gazes is merely a backdrop. The small ladder and the door through which Truman finally escapes are evidently no more than a consoling illusion. What life could he have behind the door, as if his real self were waiting for him on the other side, having miraculously taken form during his absence? If there is anything real in the story, it is the painted wall, the only place in which image and thing coincide. That is where Truman finds himself: at that point, upon that surface in which reality emerges precisely by exposing the web of its fiction as an obvious trick. Yet, ultimately, the trick is made of solid matter. It is real. It exists.

Hal Foster devoted one of the chapters in The Return of the Real (1996) to Pop art, and to Andy Warhol in particular. It is usually said that Andy Warhol’s most shocking images (electric chairs, suicides, car crashes, race riots) are sterilized by typical mass communication procedures that render them similar to all his other images: Marilyn, Coca-Cola, and advertisements. At least such was the artist’s stated intention. But it is also possible to say the opposite: allowing the horror behind the media image to come through, Warhol equates the advertisement to the image of disaster. Marilyn is equivalent to the electric chair. Both interpretations have been attempted: one insists on the referent and reads Pop art as an internal criticism of mass production for image consumption; another privileges linguistic procedures and identifies a new artistic and existential frontier in the manipulation of mass communications media, more democratic and freer precisely because it is a mere territory for exchange, in which everything and everyone are equivalent because they are all images. Foster attempts to resolve the dichotomy, showing how not even emphasis upon the referent necessarily signifies a greater engagement, nor does being reduced to an image necessarily signify lack of passion. To this end, basing himself on Lacan, he introduces the concept of the traumatic image. According to Lacan, trauma is a failure in the encounter with the Real. The latter cannot be represented because it is too shocking; it can only be repeated and repetition does not manifest but, rather, replaces and therefore conceals the original fact. Better yet: it points it out, but only as a symptom points to a disease. Seen from this perspective, Warhol’s manipulation dulls the dramatic quality of the image not because it is indifferent, but because it is the object of an overly intense emotional investment. Repetition (in the transition from photograph to silkscreen, and in the serialization of the silkscreens) is defense. Warhol himself becomes repetition and surface — almost, I would say, a silkscreen of himself. Thus, the anxiety (or at least the discomfort) brought about by Warhol’s art, in spite of its un-problematic appearance, does not lie as much in the fact itself as it does, precisely, in its voidance. Indeed, because modern art is always reflexive, his work is not merely a repetition; it is about repetition. It introduces a critical dimension in the very process of covering. In other words: Warhol is revolutionary precisely because he is alienated. Before his wall, he is finally free. According to such a reading, The Truman Show may take things a step further: what was covered up (and revealed in the end) is not a hidden referent, but the very physical identity of what is enjoyed as image.

This lengthy introduction does not mean to suggest that the critical apparatus that was elaborated for Pop art could be applied without further ado to Rodrigo Andrade’s paintings. Undoubtedly, in terms of the status of the image, the problems set forth by his figurative works were first identified by Pop art. Yet insofar as their making is concerned, he is historically and formally descended from the tradition of abstract expressionism and from its resumption in Brazilian painting of the 1980s. Indeed, few contemporary works have taken the illusionism of the image as far, while simultaneously providing such an intense sense of the physical presence of their support and paint. Thus, the question to be posed is: How is it possible to arrive at that result starting from a gestural painting, and not from a poetics that exploits technical reproduction?

During his most explicitly Neo-Expressionist period (from the late 1980s to the early 1990s), Andrade was already turning out thick, viscous paintings, at once bolder and more brightly colorful than those of his contemporaries. Were we to point out a distant precursor, it would be Van Gogh — but a Van Gogh who has already passed through the muddy filter of De Kooning. At any rate, that internal tension between bright color and heavy matter resolves itself, after a brief figurative parenthesis (including an exhibition dedicated to Oswaldo Goeldi, to which we shall need to return), in the paintings of the late 1980s: blocks of oil paints placed, through masks, upon the whiteness of the prepared canvas, so as to form homogenously colored circles and quadrangles arranged upon a smooth white background. Composition is rigorously geometric, almost neoplasticist, and the colors, if not always essential, are always marked by sharp contrasts. However, seen from up close, the paint moves: it rounds out or extends the edges in barbs, falling and creating bubbles. The oppositions between the emancipation of matter and construction of form, casual and constructed, that run through all of modernism and beyond, do not seek conciliation now — merely coexistence. The painting is matter and form, but it is matter compressed into a form; and it is form that imposes itself arbitrarily upon and against matter that pressures it.

To my mind, the most recent change of direction in Rodrigo Andrade’s art must be understood from the standpoint of those works’ negative dialectics, in which what was perceived as unitary is divided in two and can only be ultimately defined as: “neither one thing nor the other.” I am clearly referring to the kind of work that the artist began to show at the 29th Biennial de São Paulo [pp. 18-47] and continues this day, with important oscillations. Those paintings were marked by a contrast between the detailed, quasi-photographic reproduction of a space (usually a landscape) and the presence of dense blocks of paint that expose the concrete materiality of the support and colors and, by extension, the physical presence of the painting as object. The painting is a real object and the space that appears in it is also real, but the two realities never converge.

Discrepancies between the illusionism of the image and the materiality of the pictorial surface are not rare in modern painting, and they usually occur in the form of alternatives: for example, we move away from Monet’s Water Lilies so that the brushstrokes may fuse into image, we move closer to see how the image reduces itself to brushstrokes. That duplicity still sustains the art of Pollock and Rothko and justifies the centrality of the problem of scale in American painting of their time. But there is no such alternation in Andrade’s paintings. The closer we get to them, the sharper the details become, as in a Flemish painting. Simultaneously, the material becomes more solid, greasy, almost sticky. A hand’s width from the surface of the canvas, the landscape is still there, but there is no longer any illusion of depth, of emptiness: only a dense, oily, malleable substance that swells and funnels. The paint is no substitute for the landscape: the landscape is the paint. We bump right up against the horizon.

It is noteworthy that the earliest of these paintings were all somewhat disquieting night scenes. In order to justify his light-filled flat area painting, Gauguin used to say “shadow is the sun’s trompe-l’oeil.” Were we to invert the remark, we might say that, in these works clarity is the trompe-l’oeil of shadow. The material is blind, tactile. By the headlights of a car, by the light of a lamppost, the image we excavate in it is the fruit of an effort of will and, therefore, of a moral order. Andrade’s former attention to Goeldi’s work once again becomes significant. Goeldi, too, puts light on the line, in a double sense: it is a groove dug at its own risk and peril into the dark surface of the wood.

 

In Andrade as in Goeldi, the image that emerges is not the sudden revelation of an unknown reality: because it is a moral act, it is also convention and history. In Goeldi row houses, closets, and fishermen; in Andrade fragments of peripheries, asphalt roads, and stone bridges — remains of former creations but, also, remains of former images. What we see is what we ourselves have made and placed before our eyes. There is no virgin gaze. From this perspective, what Rodrigo Andrade adds to Goeldi is the experience of the trivialization of the image typical of his generation: certain subjects (the stone bridge, the sea breaking against the cliff), are so time-worn as vulgarizations of the artistic that they can only be taken up again as previously established images. It is another aspect in which Andrade’s expressionist painting converges with pop and its lineage. And it is an important point, for it generates a second axis of questions: whereas, from a spatial perspective, Rodrigo Andrade’s painting leads us to collide against the solid background of the image, from a temporal perspective, it offers us the endlessly vertiginous juxtaposition of déjà vu.

His work at the 2010 Biennial and his subsequent exhibition at the Galeria Millan dialogued explicitly with the reigning aesthetic of tableau photography of some thirty years ago: frontality, large dimensions and apparently languid composition. Slowly, Rodrigo Andrade begins to explore other types of blindness or even other coverings: snow white, watery blue, or even sunshine. Undoubtedly, identity is more loudly proclaimed whenever there is some resemblance between the material of the painting and the object of representation: snow, for instance, settles upon things like thick paint upon a thinner sort of painting [pp. 128- 129]. In other cases, the situation is inverted: the background, usually a quiet sky, is diluted and painted with detail, while backlit objects (trees, for example) are rendered in blocks of paint. The inversion implies the conquest of new territories, more subtle analyses. Whereas in previous works the light, coming from outside the frame, dug out the illusion of an image in the concrete matter of the painting, it now comes from the background, projecting the material outward — like a shadow. The transition between thin and dense regions of the painting is now medi- ated by a gradation in which (usually very delicate) progressive changes of color are associated with equally gradual changes in density. There is no longer a leap; rather, there is oscillation. Darkness is dense by definition; light should be intangible and transparent. It becomes simultaneously dense and diaphanous now — whitewashed, diffuse clarity. For the rest (and most importantly), it is the light of painting.

Although they are generally based on photographs taken by Andrade himself, the daytime landscapes [pp. 122-127] insistently return to the classical composition (of Dutch landscape painting especially), what with the diagonal road that connects the different planes of depth. Bordering on paradox, it might be said that, in this instance, the “landscape” strategy performs a function similar to that of Gestalt patterns (the spiral, for example) in constructivist art: in both cases, it would be an a priori for understanding the world. Its reason for being notwithstanding, the comparison should certainly not to be extended too much farther. In a way, the traditional landscape scheme is a product of that which is defined by Merleau-Ponty as the “structure of behavior”. It is the perceptual complement to a motor behavior. We penetrate Andrade’s painting as a Dutchman might have moved through real space in his day. But country walks are no longer a commonplace behavior. If anything, it became an aesthetic entertainment, a stroll (and so, in a phenomenology of the stroll, the analogy should be inverted: we advance through space as if we were penetrating a painting with our gaze). Our standard relationship with space is a flattened, photographic one, like something seen from a car window, or a printed image — such are Andrade’s night scenes. Once its relationship to motion is gone, the daytime landscape strategy reveals its nature as image — actually, as an image of an image, a portrait of a painting.

Unlike the preceding period, which called for a superior scale, the best works in this series — to my mind — are the small ones: not only because they are closer in size to their seventeenth century models, but also because, in broader ranges, the dialectic between matter and representation runs the risk of becoming too gestural or dramatic whereas, in smaller canvases, it is a continuous vibration, like a scar on the surface of the image that mildly prevents it from becoming exclusively optical. No longer the oppressive presence of a mass in which the gaze must dig its place, but a sort of pasty duplication of the retinal impression within which vision becomes stuck.

This line of investigation is continued in the Bicromias [Duo-chromes] [pp. 152-173], in which Andrade uses only two similar colors, or even two shades of the same color. A single image may be prepared in different colors to generate a series. Thus, the painter no longer imitates the representation itself (derived as it may be from a painting or a photograph), but a possible graphic treatment of it that is usually carried out by machines.

As an example, let us take an image that generated a fairly long series: an image derived from a landscape by Don McCullin, an English photographer best known for his war reportage, but who (in this case) was evidently inspired by eighteenth and early nineteenth century English painting: a brook zigzagging into the background, a dirt road that flanks it interrupted by a gate, an open-branched tree stamped against the sky that occupies an almost central position – in short: the entire repertory of the aesthetic of the picturesque; more an idea of a landscape than a real one. Reduced to two colors, the composition further emphasizes its decorative calling. The especially broad play of allusions, in a continuous chain that extends from the dawn of modern art to the procedures of graphic reproduction, seems definitely to shun any referent. Yet the landscape existed, it was photographed. And the painting exists; it does not resolve itself in an anoyne juxtaposition of procedures and conventions.  Each pair of colors reacts differently to light, and imposes a variety of treatments: sometimes short, solid brushstrokes; at other times broader motions; paint that is sometimes thicker and, at other times, more diluted. It is precisely in those series, when Andrade most closely adopts a Pop attitude (let us think of Warhol’s Shadows, for example), that his affiliation to a pictorial tradition in which gesture determines meaning is most clearly reasserted.

Another series of Duochromes is based on a photograph by Daido Moriyama of a stormy sea. Once before, Andrade had used a Moriyama image of a Tokyo [p. 44] street and, on that occasion, the transition from print to painting had evinced something that remained implicit in photography: the relationship that Moriyama’s singular use of black and white bears with India ink painting and traditional Japanese wood block printing. Whether or not intended by the photographer, another kind of memory emerges here: Courbet’s seascapes.

Courbet is something of a compulsory passage within the investigation Rodrigo Andrade is conducting. There is no light in Courbet’s canvases, there is practically no air; he painted only what is solid. The sky itself is always covered with dense clouds. The material of the painting and the materiality of the world are superimposed point by point, until they have almost coincided. And — possibly for the first time in modern terms — that search for the perfect coincidence posits the problem of scale. Courbet’s paintings are large, even when subject and composition might suggest genre painting, because they are intended not only as representations but as equivalents of the world. Andrade’s seascapes (via Moriyama) [pp. 152-159], as well as the closed woods, all of them recent works, evidently allude to Courbet. And, not by chance, large dimensions are once more tackled here, in a fairly convincing manner. He expands the seascapes, and his forests, typified by a similar outlook and an intricate figuration, propose anew the claustrophobic atmosphere of his early night scenes — but with important innovations.

One canvas in particular shows a tree fallen upon a marsh which has flooded the lower edge of the frame. The situation suggests quite a varied range of treatments: the marsh water is diluted, muddy paint; the rocks that emerge from it are drawn in quick, dense brushstrokes; the tree trunk is more detailed and the darkness of the blocks of smooth black paint emerges amid the branches. In this instance the blind material of the night scenes is cleaved by a network of dry branches, as if cracked — something akin to Alberto Burri’s Cretti (craquelés). Not the least of this work’s qualities is the fact that it establishes a relationship, albeit a possibly unintentional one, between two essential thinkers of the relationship between form and raw matter: Burri and Courbet. And it is important that such allusions not be (or at least not present themselves as) intentional, but emerge naturally through the continuous effort to establish analogies between the material of the representation and the material of the thing represented.

Along this line of reason, there is one last work I consider worthy of recollection: it reproduces the image of a tsunami [pp. 140-143], at the moment in which a first veil of water penetrates among buildings, before the great wave. Andrade chose a lofty perspective from which only the foundations of buildings are visible. The curve outlined by the ground between the lower edge of the painting and the progressively more emphasized perspective of the background contrasts with the vertical lines that the zenithal light makes upon the water through a strip of light and shadow — the heaviest and most emphasized to the right, corresponding to the shadow of the nearest building.

Obviously, knowing what it is about adds urgency to the painting: to the still gentle way that the water spreads, it might be the explosion of a water main. But the very image inundates; the paint is a flood. Far from being an inert mass into which an image must be dug, it is now the event itself. The gaze that would penetrate in depth is obstructed by the flatness of its mass, the impenetrability of its reflections. Above these, there are still wavy lines that suggest the direction of the current — not Courbet’s stormy sea but the surface ripples of the Impressionists, now made gigantic. We know how important the representation of water was to the emergence of modern painting. But, like everything else, it can no longer be the object of serene contemplation (La Grénouillière…), only of immediate, frightened apprehension. The snapshot is the current form of perception, and it is actually along these lines that photography contaminates painting.

What prevents Andrade’s painting from becoming a citationist game of marked cards is that, in it, unlike pop or hyper-realism, there is no comprehensive technique to render all images equivalent; nor is there, as in much recent painting (Tuymans would be the best example), a subjectivist stance that transforms the painting into a sort of personal memory of the image and covers the every figure with a patina of affection. Andrade’s painting seeks an objective relationship to things, even when those things are, ultimately, other images. The reality of what we see does not lie in the referent, itself a representation, nor in the sign that, no matter how material, exists only as long as it alludes to something else (another sign). It lies in the continued effort to establish convincing (that is, not merely conventional) relationships between one and the other. It is a completed action, that is, a making — not just a procedure that implies repetition of a pattern. It seems to me that — even during his figurative period — it is in this sense that Rodrigo Andrade’s painting must be read within the lineage of action painting.
 

Lorenzo Mammì is art critic and professor of philosophy at Universidade de São Paulo (USP).

 

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