Interview Rodrigo Andrade × Tiago Mesquita

I met Rodrigo Andrade a few times during the first half of 2014 so that we could talk about his latest work. The interview is a result of those meetings. Chronologically, we dealt with what has changed in his painting since 2009. We spoke of illusion, the artist’s dialogue on contemporary and traditional issues, and how these latest paintings relate to his path. The interview is divided into different parts based on the series of paintings approached in each one of them. In each part, we analyze the matters suggested by the specific works.

T       You work on your figurative painting with dense, contoured and concentrated paint. It’s a treatment your abstract paintings have showed in 1999. The form is bulky; the color has weight, aside from its thickness. Your latest paintings have this weight as the theme. When and how does matter become important in your painting?

R      Ever since the Casa 7¹ period, my painting has tended to accumulate matter. I think my interest came from a Van Goghian wish to graft reality onto the image, a hallucinatory wish to produce a landscape painting as concrete as the world’s real landscape. Yet on my paintings up to the 1990s, matter spread throughout the surface. It was an expansive tendency. On my abstract works, it contracted and concentrated inside those closed blocks well delimited by the stencil, which made the volume exacerbate.

Alberto Tassinari makes a very apt comparison: he sets my painting alongside [Edvard] Munch’s Scream. With Munch, the form echoes the character’s scream. The scream deforms the whole painting. What I do is the opposite, a scream that does not expand and remains contained. That is why matter is more morbid and has an artificial color resembling Andy Warhol’s. It’s in my abstract paintings that my work obtained the character it has shown to this day.

T             How did you go from the abstract paintings to the dark, illusionistic canvases shown at the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, in 2010?

R             I feel condemned to a constant movement, resembling somewhat Picasso. My path has many radical changes and ruptures. From the great change of course right after Casa 7 and even before. You could talk about a pendular or circular movement between figuration and abstraction, but the questions always return on another level, as if in a spiral. Whatever the case, I am not an artist who works through depuration, someone who keeps refining procedures and repertoire, like Brazilian artist Paulo Pasta, for example. My process is less continuous, and that is why my painting’s strongest moment is when I find a new way of painting. I seek discovery and territory inhabitation much more than properly depuration.

In the present case, this passage has not been as gradual as the late 1990s transition from the figurative to the abstract, for I did not abandon the abstract for the figurative. I kept working on abstract paintings, but I sensed that the procedure was being exhausted. I was eager for change and saw many possible paths. Aside from the first figurative attempts, I even made a few experiments with words, for example.

Being close to much younger Brazilian painters like Ana Prata, Bruno Dunley, Marina Rheingantz and Rodrigo Bivar, who emerged within this universe of photographic images, also encouraged me to face change and made this territory more familiar.

T             You went from your less illusionistic phase to a more illusionistic one by far. In 2008, your painting dealt with simpler forms and direct relationships. Those were rectangular or circular masses on a flattened surface. In the 2010 Biennial, the images are photographic and endowed with perspective. What led you to work with illusion at that time?

R             There was an irresistible wish for figuration and the creation of recognizable symbols that might be somewhat narrative. In fact, I went from one extreme to the other, but while I made the abstract paintings I used to paint observation landscapes as a pastime. I painted them in a, let’s say, [Jean-Baptiste Camille] Corot fashion, back to an old post-adolescent habit. At that time, I wanted to bring to artistic production what was a distraction to me, bring this kind of genuine pleasure of painting to the body of my work.

What opened a range of possibilities was the fact that I included photography in my working process. I had never taken pictures and had always been a dunce with a camera. So I bought one in 2006. I took it in a trip and shot spaces, environments, landscapes and many night scenes with a flash. The images were not about the trip but about places. I stored them in my computer, not knowing that they would become paintings… Well, maybe I did know.

In the beginning of 2009, I decided to make paintings based on those pictures. I chose the night images and began to seek something else in the painting. In the abstract ones, I think I looked for a “fundament” of painting: paint on canvas, in a scheme of at least two elements capable of establishing a relationship. In that case, the game had summary rules. It was a fundamentalist painting. Well then, I think that figurative paintings also try to maintain this procedural orthodoxy, but in another game, that of illusion and its criticism. It’s about the opposition between plan and matter and the image, something essential in our tradition. The counterpoint between what is physical in how this form of art is produced and what is imaginary— or imaginative — in illusion.

The dimension of the game is a determinant in art in general, and in painting in particular, for the very delimitation of the canvas already configures a kind of field where the game takes place. By the way, as I read [Johan] Huizinga’s² Homo Ludens, I learned that the word “illusion” literally means “in play” (inludere). This idea is a very good fit for my painting. Whatever the case, illusion has a power of natural fascination, a sort of perceptive hypnosis that gives the viewer immediate pleasure and I am interested in this relation based on sensory attraction.

T             Is there on your part any literary curiosity in the choice of the night theme? Would it derive from any romantic meaning attributed to the night or its frequent associations with horror and fear?

R             I used to be a fan of horror films and I used to be an inveterate owl. I steel feel attracted to the quiet and solitude of the night. At night it may seem like objects are out of their daily natural habitat. And there may be some kind of life suspension at night. Maybe some kind of metaphysics of the night touches me. And I am very fond of [James Abbott] Whistler’s maritime nocturnes, aside from the very grim [Oswaldo] Goeldi.

T             Those meanings stem more from the way you sort your works than from the images themselves. What kind of change did you impart to the photographic image as you painted it?

R             The darkened area became deeper and that prosaic image of a street night scene obtained an altered state. There is a second space inside the image. The image itself points to the canvas’s background like a view seen through the window, but the paint is projected our way. Its weight seems to put the illusion into play. It’s then possible to see something beyond the virtual image.

Without the presence of the paint’s thickness and the stencil procedure, the painting would be too subservient to the image. I needed something to displace it and take it away from that condition. The image needed real physical, corporeal presence to become a painting, to avoid falling into the mere pictorial banality of the conventional image.

The images obtained a certain spatial complexity. There is the concrete, planar space of the matter on the surface at the same time there is another space, of illusion. The darkness of the squeegee-smoothed mass of paint served to create a no-definition zone where both spaces could alternately or simultaneously occur.

I always think of Jasper Johns’ spatial concept. 29 He speaks of “a space within another, a space upon another, a space next to another… what emerges in one case, what disappears in another”.³ My painting also makes two spaces coexist. I don’t know whether it’s one upon another or one at the same time as another. The illusion space appears sharply to the viewer, but as they come closer that space is dissolved and the plane emerges. We see the matter and the signs of painting. But that does not unmake the illusion. Spatial duplicity remains. It’s an ambiguity. Thus the work did not describe just a landscape, but also the matter that shaped the illusionistic painting. The illusion is belied by the screen, which is not only the plane of the canvas but also the matter projected towards the viewer’s direction rather than towards the background.

T             Illusion has a very negative standing within the order of thought and is treated as a relative of deception. Such rejection is of platonic nature. You don’t seem to deal with illusion as something necessarily deceitful.

R             I don’t. It’s in the sense of an image that doesn’t try to delude. That is maybe why, if my painting remained within the realm of illusion, it would even lose its specificity and strength, which are its pictorial load. Were it only illusion, going to the movies would do it. What I am interested in is the double space that oscillates between the illusionistic and the non illusionistic, the concrete, the material. It’s the game I mentioned earlier. That is what makes this painting art.

By the way, that “negative standing” of illusion is interesting. In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the Devil tells composer Adrian Leverkühn that music no longer has the freedom of pure play it used to have. Free play assumed established conventions that went away with modernity. To the book’s character, the essence of music was critique. The Devil’s discourse is well suited to modern art and the 1960s and 1970s avant-gardes.

Currently, however, critique itself — whether of art or of the world — has become a part of the art game, and has thus become conventional. But this is not just something to be regretted. Today, freedom of art also follows it. Any game is possible. Each artist chooses and sets the conventions he or she pleases. This entails such freedom in art history as we have never seen. Before modern art, conventions were pre-established. Now we neither have conventions as an orthodox prescription nor do we need to break them; we break them if we want to.

T             This relationship between painting and conventions is food for thought. You deal with the very clichés of language and place them in a critical situation. Why did you choose your themes so close to cliché?

R             The first night scenes I painted were deserted streets, a sidewalk, an overpass, a grid, the seaside, the city lights and water hitting rocks; all were completely meaningless places in themselves, common images at first. Is there a greater cliché than breaking waves at the seaside? But I consider this banality of the scenes a fundamental part of my poetic construction. Those are ordinary, placeless spaces. The seaside is generic, the road is generic. Insignificance gives anonymity to the landscape.

T             In your next exhibition Velha ponte de pedra [Old Stone Bridge], you begin from a different imagery. Cinematographic and urban motifs are gone and something related to the technical process appears different. What changed?

R             During the São Paulo Biennial, I became certain that I would produce even larger paintings from then on. I realized that my painting held its tension between matter and image the more it maintained its physical relationship with the viewer. So I increased the canvas size. My next paintings were almost continuous with the gallery floor. Thus that road [pp. 58-59] over three meters and a half wide was almost as large as the real road. The painting then became larger than the viewer and almost scenographical. At the same time, the violence and materiality of the paint are imposed in a more pronounced manner, especially because the paint layer obtained increased thickness.

It was also the first time I did not produce night paintings but landscapes at dusk, half-lit or under an indefinite lighting. A few lights began to emerge, a few colors that could be transformed into thick matter. I am thinking of that Ponte sobre riacho ao entardecer [Bridge over Stream at Dusk] [pp. 60-61]. Earlier, the thick paint layer had only one color — black — spread in a single squeegee pass, but now the situation required that I include more colors in the paint layer I smoothed and flattened with the squeegee, still in a single pass (I later began to make paintings with several squeegee passes). Though it represented light and atmosphere, the paint layer had a more diverse coloring. There could be up to three or four colors within the same mass of paint the bluish tone of the deep forest, the black of shadows and the greenish brown of the vegetation reflected in water.

T             In that period, were all your paintings made from the pictures you took? Were you already thinking about turning your photos into paintings when you took them?

R             All of them. And somewhere in the middle of my São Paulo Biennial production, I began to produce images I knew would turn into paintings. I took pictures and already thought of the paintings they could yield. Until then, I used the images I had without really knowing what they could be good for.

When I started that photographic painting phase, I imagined I could splurge on the available world of images as so many current painters, but it didn’t happen. Only the pictures I took myself, those I had a personal relationship with, did become a painting. I looked for images of known things. The first ones in this series were the seaside pictures [pp. 32-33]. I wanted to shoot the seaside at night, the foam emerging from the darkness. Those are highly traditional romantic themes. I went to Ubatuba, and kept doing hundreds of those all night long until I got one right. And sometime after the Biennial I had the idea of doing the stone bridge, the Old Stone Bridge.

T             Why the stone bridges?

R             The inspiration was a painting I had made in the 1980s for the Arte na rua [Art on the Street] project. At the time, Aracy Amaral called me to paint an outdoor. Curiously, I made a wrecked stone bridge, a theme well in tune with the 1980s trans-avant-garde. To be true, it was a theme from kitsch and vulgar painting, and I had the memory of something I had always liked: the paintings in amusement parks and dark rides.

I remembered all that and thought the theme would bear fruit. I looked it up in the Internet and wrote “old stone bridge” and was surprised to see 49-dollar paintings instead of stone bridge pictures.

T             Anything good?

R             No, all of them were dreadful. It was comical. But I was surprised by the reach of the cliché. And it confirmed my old inspiration from the 1980s. I was attracted by that mediocre imagery. The ugliness of those paintings encouraged me even more to do my stone bridge. It was so ordinary. The theme belonged to a very cheapened culture. I looked for the sources and discovered very interesting bridges. Many were from Scotland and I have a personal history with Scotland, where my father lived in exile for seven years, so I decided to go back to the country I had constantly visited in my youth and rent a car to shoot stone bridges across the country. I discovered beautiful places, with picturesque eighteenth century bridges.

My work entailed a wider production to produce the images that would serve as a model for the paintings. From those pictures, I made about five stone bridge paintings. I also painted little roads with that kind of fairytale scenery that was also somewhat haunted.

T             Do you think that a tourist’s gaze on that landscape interferes in the constitution of those images?

R             I don’t know. It does and it doesn’t. Of course, travel pictures are taken in a state of availability for contemplation, though in my case the availability for contemplation had a productive purpose. It was about joining work and pleasure, or better yet, pleasure and pleasure. Besides, all the places where I collected images are related to my personal history: Scotland, Ubatuba, São Paulo, Morro da Garça. Though a situation of idleness exists, it’s the familiar that interests me. I don’t go to those places to be surprised.

I already had the image of the stone bridge on my mind, the seaside and the road as well. I think the issue is to bring known places or ordinary scenes to some altered state of painting and even erase from it affective relationships. They are not in the painting’s result. The themes interest me for the conventional element in them. There was no unknown. Anything unknown could only come up by the painting process in my workshop.

T             It’s funny that your procedure is almost the opposite of direct observation painting. You take trips to the nature in search of an image and try to bring this image closer to a kind of model of spatial pictorial creation, a model of pictorial representation, so in fact you are also painting a way of making paintings.

R             Exactly! I looked for impersonality in those paintings, as well as in the way of doing them, however gestural. The idea was to preserve a relation of neutrality with the image.

T             Now your painting is also changed. How is the use of paint and stencil modified? Here the part painted by the brush seems to detach even more from the thick and opaque mass placed on the canvas through the stencil technique.

R             It’s a very different painting. The brushstroke on the Biennial works was deliberately more impersonal and descriptive and was almost an engineer’s paintwork. I looked for a neutral painting, as faithful to photography as possible.

T             It was the closest description you managed.

R             Right, even with a very apparent brushstroke, I tried to capture, for example, the sea foam the way I saw it on the image. It wasn’t a matter of technical excellence, but a kind of neutrality regarding personal choices. That change happened in the paintings I showed at Millan [pp. 54-87].⁴  I began to give more importance to the painting itself. Matter and darkness were no longer the only subject. I painted the vegetation with a more direct approach. I projected the picture on the canvas but painted faster.

T             How was the technical passage from the picture to the canvas?

R             I traced the projected picture on the canvas.

T             And you tagged the color?

R             No, I did the color by sight. I kept this projection procedure for the Old Stone Bridge exhibition but was less strict come painting time. At one point I though: “All right, I’ll use a large and wide brush and, well, have fewer qualms about the image.” The brushed painting was a little more visible. When I stopped using the projector, that’s when the procedure really changed. I just watched the picture and painted it as if it were an observation of nature. Of course it’s not the same, it’s totally different, but at some point in the road paintings I stopped using the projector.

T             No more projections?

R             No more projections. I try to make my distortions in the way I arrange things present on the painting, somehow.

T             I remember your exhibition showed different uses for masses of paint on the recording studio [pp. 78-81] and the pinball machine paintings [pp. 70-73]… Does it begin to distinguish the nature of the objects?

R             It’s true, you are absolutely right. The matter is used to paint the darkness but also to create the wood texture and the instrument cables, in fact to make all that was black: shadows, objects and so on.

It tries to reduce different things to the same matte the paint. The image is illusion and matter. Thus that anonymous painting seems to bear greater complexity, something between the image and the object.

T             Do the themes reinforce the crudeness of black paint?

R             The themes I use are partly related to the themes of the Praça da República⁵ paintings and were already used in the nineteenth century advanced paintings. I have a feeling that it was [Gustave] Courbet who invented the painting of breaking waves, I think he was the one who put that cliché up there.

Just the other day, I realized it’s possible to see my painting as a sort of continuous link between the thinnest and plainest Praça da República painting and Jasper Johns, who is at the top in quality, sophistication, everything. There’s a will to place painting in a realm unrestricted to great art, a sort of democratic utopia.

I think my painting deals with complex and sophisticated art issues, sure, but from images somewhat related to vulgar paintings and images.

T             Tradition appears as a frequent subject in your works. How does it inform the illusionistic paintings?

R             My will to make paintings comes mainly from the paintings I have already seen. I have a visceral relationship with traditional art. I can spend hours after hours inside a museum, for days on end, whenever I travel. It’s an obsession. To me, ancient paintings are loaded with currentness, regardless of the time traces they bear. And if the landscape as a genre is basically pre-modern, I somehow try to use my painting to make it current.

T             Two aspects are changed in your work shown at Maria Antonia:⁶ one of them is the way of placing the mass of paint, which looks either more contoured or almost without cutouts, and the other one is the coloring. What is changed?

R             The Maria Antonia exhibition was composed by more or less three distinct groups: the Brazilian road paintings, the snow landscapes and the aerial views. There was also a lone deserted beach, which had been ready before I began the smaller paintings.

At this point, I was already painting with no projection. My first interest was to ascribe more versatility to the mass of paint. It could have colors other than just the pitch black and could also meet with different situations, not only the depth that lost its definition but also the shadow or sometimes the very volume of the trees, the snow and so on. In that way, there is liberation of color and matter itself, though the mass of paint is given a less structuring role.

Many times, I started painting by spreading the mass of paint, especially in the winter landscapes and aerial views, contrary to my procedure so far, which had been to just conclude the paintings with a squeegee pass on the mass of paint. Those paintings were made from the first layer of thick paint. The brush painting was done over a creamy, still wet covering. Later, at the end, another stencil application of mass of paint concluded the paintings.

In those canvases, all of them daytime landscapes, there was also a tonal challenge. The choice of tonality for each thing had to be in a composition with the rest of the painting. For example, the bluish tinge of the snow white had to be right. In the aerial view paintings, you could see on the mass of paint just the fading of the passage from the earth to the sky. It whitened away and lost its lushness on its way to the horizon. The challenge was to maintain tonal coherence in a single squeegee pass with whatever illusionism was in the painting.

T             Was that a success criterion for your painting?

R             Yes, it was a success criterion. It was a personal challenge I had set to myself, and as I said it was one of the rules of the game. Anyway, from the Biennial to the present days, those are maybe the paintings that come closest to a virtuosity risk, I guess. I had a vague impression that some people saw it that way. I expect they are not limited to that. I think this game between illusion and mass of paint, between a transparent image and a bulky interdiction, is sufficiently explicit there. So I think I escape from sterile virtuosity, or anything like it.

T             In those paintings, you deal with specific landscape issues. You discuss tonal passages, lighting, the relationship between the sky and the horizon and aerial points of view. Those are genre-specific issues. When you went searching for images, did you look for those compositional issues?

R             I sort of had it on my mind as I collected images. I put an idea in my head that I wanted to make a winter, snow landscape. It was a propitious situation for my work. Piled-up snow almost mimetically serves as a theme for my painting because of the paint layer and its thickness. Moreover, let’s just say: a snow landscape has a dominating tone, either white or bluish. The depth is wholly milky, just like I deal with paint.

I consciously mobilized the conventions of art history. I had, for example, just seen [Pieter] Bruegel to an exhaustive point. So both the panoramic views and the winter landscapes were stimulated by my plunge into Bruegel’s painting.

The awareness of the genre is a given. Painting was made impersonal by the adoption of conventions and by the adhesion to a genre too established in art history and to its rules. Banality comes from the excess of convention. Those paintings are in a certain way anti-subjective and anti-expressive. I seek some objectivity, I would say, with some exaggeration, an anti-egotic thing.

T             And some of them may even resemble academic forms, for example. Landscapes run that risk, don’t they? There is a danger that painting might be so identified to convention that it stops being something else. What did you do to prevent convention from swallowing the work of art, so that it doesn’t become just a regurgitated version of convention?

R             At first, painting is indeed almost swallowed by convention, but it later distances itself. I believe in the strangeness my procedure brings to the image. In fact, I paradoxically seek originality in my proximity to convention. Whether I achieve it or not is another matter. But it resembles what I did at the bar with the abstract paintings. Those abstract paintings were also close to being nothing. Conforming to convention is a different way of being nothing. There is something of contemporary art there, the closeness to the non artistic. In his O espaço moderno [Modern Space],⁷ Alberto Tassinari speaks of the relationship between work and the common world and its action at the threshold of both worlds, the work’s world and the daily common world. In the case of those landscapes, the common world is also on the side of convention, not only in the concrete mass of paint.

In short, the closeness to the painting clichés is a risk I take to create tension, just like I did in a different way with Lanches Alvorada. In that situation, the bar could swallow the painting. Now, it is convention that can swallow the painting. But it is in that place of doubt that I want to situate my work. For a moment, paintings must even generate suspicion. Such extreme risk situations have always interested me. I like the idea that something looks ordinary and a more attentive look makes it possible to perceive how out of place convention is. The constant risk of falling into banality or conventionalism is what makes my work more exciting. Painting and art with no risk is no fun.

T             Those were small works; do you think you dealt with them differently, for example, from the colossal landscapes, which had movie projection scale?

R             With the Pinturas de estrada [Road Paintings], there was a will to reclaim a more intimistic relationship with painting. A little earlier I had made a few observation still lifes that didn’t get to the exhibition. Yet the road paintings have no intimacy whatsoever and are pure exteriority as a natural tendency in my work, but at least the small format was bound to enhance the series’ worth. Their size also enabled and reinforced procedural variations. And since the paintings were much closer to naturalistic and banal images, the presence of masses of paint contributed as a surprise. Besides, a very important fact is that the thickness of masses of paint has a more extreme effect depending on the canvas size.

T             But do you think your choice of smaller canvases is somehow related to easel painting?

R             Maybe it is; I hadn’t thought about it, but maybe it is. They are a result of the observation paintings I used to make on my easel in my abstract phase, for sheer pleasure, though in this case my using a picture as a starting point makes a huge difference. By the way, a side remark: that wish to bring the sheer pleasure of painting observation landscapes to the body of my work has in a sense gone wrong, for the whole procedure I employ is too much hard work and the act of painting has no pleasantness.

T             What kind of painting did you associate with them? Be- cause their thickness recalls a picturesque trait of English painting, don’t you think? They also have much of seventeenth century Dutch painting.

R             What I had in mind was seventeenth century Dutch painting. More than anything: [Jacob van] Ruisdael, [Meindert] Hobbema, a lot of [Johannes] Vermeer. I also thought much about nineteenth century painting, Corot, Courbet and yes, John Constable, one of my favorites since my youth.

T             In the Pinturas do mundo que flui [Paintings of the World that Flows] did you work with other people’s images?

R             I did. Exactly. In that case, films and internet videos. Paintings of the World that Flows is the translation of Ukiyo-ê.⁸ Those Japanese engravings had a taste for daily life and strolls. Sure, they had their ghost series, monsters, tidal waves and whirlwinds, but basically when you see those works, it is the picturesque that catches the eye. And it also reveals a taste for depicting and drawing water (the most usual translation for Ukiyo-e is “paintings of the floating world”),⁹ which is very natural for islanders. I also have this attraction for what is liquid, but, beyond that, fluency means using images from world events: a tsunami in Japan, a bombing in Libya, as well as scenes from films, which are images “that flow”, and also day-to-day situations like people bathing in a lake or people walking on some street. Those, by the way, are the only paintings with characters in the whole figurative series.

I worked with images taken from newspapers and other publications. I was invited to produce a visual essay for Revista novos estudos – Cebrap¹⁰ and worked with stencils that made a graphic copy of hot scenes in the current news at the time. There was a presidential summit, Gaddafi’s portrait and more prosaic images of stores and car repair shops, of bathers and insects. It was that series that paved the way for other people’s images.

T             The World that Flows also includes film scenes you painted.

Which were they?

R             [Andrei] Tarkovsky’s Solaris, [Stanley] Kubrick’s Lolita, [Alfred] Hitchcock’s Psycho and Karim Aïnouz’s road movie O céu de Suely [Love for Sale]. I painted four films. Empty landscapes of those films. A black and white swamp from Psycho, that Solaris lake, a road vanishing in a fog from Lolita and a road at sunset from O céu de Suely [p. 97].

They are paintings with a TV and cinema coloring. The Psycho scene is in black and white. They are mainly monochromatic. Though I have taken a very different path, those works announce some aspects of what I am doing now.

T             Your insistence on genres in general and specifically on landscapes can be seen throughout your latest production. Do you find it curious that such a thing shows in an artist who, like you have mentioned, has the pleasure of discovery?

R             It is curious indeed… Well, it’s about two different aspects, albeit complementary. One is aesthetic; it concerns using convention as a motive for the paintings. I would say that my painting really structures itself in the struggle with pictorial matter and also with pictorial conventions. I need as much materiality as conventions in order to create my game. Thus my pleasure of discovery lies in inventing a new formula that might allow me to produce new paintings. Many paintings. So it was with the 1999 color blocks, and so it was in 2009 with the photographic and thick paintings. It’s about creating a little system that might yield propitious situations for those struggles, and the if there is originality in my work, it is when those struggles emerge.

The other aspect is really biographical, for my childhood environment was revolutionary; my parents were guerillas and were political prisoners. The revolutionary horizon was highly inflamed in my young imagination. The heroic side of revolution. I think part of my optimism comes from that.

But where did that flame develop in my work? What I do has critical thinking; it seeks originality but is not revolutionary. I paint landscapes! And then in Retrato calado [Silenced portrait] (1988) by Roberto Salinas,¹¹ who was a friend of my parents’, I read: “Those who submit themselves to the tyranny of landscape is a reactionary. He admires the sunset.” And I, born in a revolutionary nest and a painter of landscapes, was a little angry, but I soon thought that, although my painting surely has a contemplative side, in no way does it submit to landscape. My painting radically intervenes in the landscape with my procedure, my gesture and the materiality of the paint. Besides, I am sure that my painting rejects any utilitarian designation, even that of art historicism. Those archaic heroic impulses took a painter’s radically individualistic contour in me, and the power structures I fight are those of narcissism and of my own psyche.

I am a thousand times closer to Freud than to Marx…

T            In your latest paintings, you seem to work with less illusionistic scenes, whether in the duochromes, in the waves or in the Chegada do tsunami [Arrival of the Tsunami].

R             In fact, my work now has opened more than one front. The paths are close, but they run in parallel.

T             But they have a lot in common. In relation to the more photographic paintings, the color procedure was altered. Your fidelity to image is no longer the same.

R             Yes, explicitly.

T             How did that happen?

R             First, as I began the Road Paintings and meddled with the colors of a tonal painting, I perceived a color potential in them that was not achieved in the realistic paintings. I missed my abstract paintings. I felt like elaborating on it and made new abstract paintings with the pigments I used in the figurative ones. Later, more recently, I made abstract metal cut prints with great color variation and also made realistic prints using color more explicitly. The duochromes arose from those movements and from seeing, in exhibitions, pictures that seemed to fit my work.

First I saw a few pictures of Don McCullin’s woods and painted from them. It was a great deal. The black and white pictures had already been thought in a pictorial way. In Don McCullin’s case, most of Constable’s conventions on the picturesque landscape were there.

There was a call to painting in the photograph itself. I thought of a little black and white series. Halfway through, a crisis with color occurred. I then had the idea of painting, not with the images’ black and white, but with other colors, one playing the part of black and the other the part of white. The idea came ready to go: dark green over light blue [p. 164], which is by the way a Volpi combination. It was something rooted in my chromatic culture.

The first paintings worked out very well. A new path opened for me. They made me think of older graphic effects like duotone and solarization. I also thought of Warhol’s silkscreens and saw the electric chairs again and even used a few of his color combinations, though my painting is different and has a principle of impregnation. Colors have to mix and impregnate one another… But anyway, it was almost high-contrast painting, with tonal passages. The mass respects the sharp cut of the stencil, but between the cutout stains and the rest of the image, there was a half-tone sector where colors were mixed.

I had to maintain the chiaroscuro for the painting to remain structured as an unrecognizable image, but the formula allowed me to use any color if need be. And I experimented with gray over pink, orange over skin color, black over purple, cobalt blue over beige, black over bluish gray, in short, a lot of colors. In the wave made with yellow over light gray [pp. 154-155], the chiaroscuro reaches its limit. The image structuring is always hanging by a thread.

T             They almost fall into abstraction, the image nearly disappears. It’s on the verge of no longer being an image.

R             I like the proximity between the blur and the image, but that painting can’t become an abstraction. It is structured on the dichotomy between the illusion and the mass of paint, it is a border zone. But those paintings no longer follow the same rules established by my painting since Night Pieces.

T             True, illusion here is different from your other paintings and does not yield to photographic verisimilitude. There is no need for realism in these new paintings. Not only in the Bicromias [Duochromes], neither in the Arrival of the Tsunami, nor in the images of the woods or ruins.

R             The photographic illusion leaves center stage. What is needed now is to maintain the feeling of depth and atmosphere to some degree. Even though they are not so illusionistic, as soon as you configure in your mind that it is a wave or the woods, it brings in itself the virtuality that draws it closer to the more illusionistic works. Tension is a part of the game. It has to hold.

T             Now, the thematic aspect of these works makes us think. The mode of painting seems more narrative, just like the chosen motifs. There is something cruder in the use of paint and more corrosive in the use of color. Much has to do with dissolution. It is the landscape that crackles before the fall of the dead tree [pp. 178-181], the wave that unmakes a shape and becomes foam [pp. 146-151], and the tsunami [pp. 140-143]. Is there something destructive in this new mode of painting?

R             In a certain sense, there is. The tsunami theme was chosen because its nature resembles that of my painting, whether in the tsunami’s aerial views or in the Arrival of the Tsunami, which is when a layer of water goes on to cover the tarmac. Now, it is evident that once the themes are chosen, the literary meanings come along with it. It is a strong theme and it involves a series of eschatological connotations: a destructive wave, a dead tree, and the tsunami arrival that comes to announce a tragedy of biblical proportions.

I was first interested in the tsunami because of the fact itself, it had nothing to do with painting. I spent nights watching those videos. It was something that caused a strange form of euphoria. Something similar happened with the 9/11 attack. The images of those falling towers were spectacularly tragic and brought a disturbing, really eschatological euphoria. But there was nothing there that inspired a painting, unlike the tsunami, wherein the layer of water that covered the city surface mimetically served my painting. There was a personal interest in the theme itself, but what made me try to use it in my painting was a really pictorial idea. Besides, I availed myself of the aerial view of Bruegel’s paintings once again.

That’s for the Arrival of the Tsunami. It was different for the other works. The breaking wave came explicitly from Courbet. 82, 83 I saw a painting of Courbet’s wave at the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and felt like repainting it in the same way that I remade Ranchinho’s works. The idea was to replicate Courbet with my painting, to project the image and make something out of it, using the same colors and my technique.

I even ordered a canvas of the same size to paint my version but never did it. Later, as I prepared for the Arrival of the Tsunami, I reviewed the print screens I had reserved and found pictures of waves. I had the idea of fulfilling the wish awakened by Courbet’s painting by using the tsunami wave, thus updating the idea.

T             The wave theme won you over. You unfolded it in several paintings and even inserted it in the Duochromes series.

R             As I leafed through Daido Moriyama’s Labyrinth,¹² a book with only contact prints, I saw pictures of waves hitting rocks. Just like McCullin’s pictures referred to English paintings, those referred to Courbet. Again! Besides, the theme is a romantic painting classic that became banal, another one that ended up at the Praça da República market. Yet I imagined the black and white images served for the duochromes and diverse color experiments, just like I had already done with McCullin’s woods.

T             Thinking again of the relationship between theme and form, you already dealt, in some paintings, with more hostile natural situations related to the theme.

R             In fact, this comes from way back. In Night Pieces, there was already something of this haunted dimension. For example, I dealt with what is menacing in the night. Later, I painted catastrophes as a theme in some works of Paintings of the World that Flows. And now that aspect became really more explicit in the tsunamis as well as the woods.

And I once again found in art history paintings that met my inclinations. For example, the landscapes in Lucas Cranach’s paintings, of which I saw a lot in Berlin and Vienna, suggest this relationship with nature. In the works of Renaissance German artists, by the way, it is not only the landscape that is hostile, but also the human body, and the female bodies are somewhat alien. It is sensuality mingled with something monstrous. The fact is that I became fascinated by Cranach’s background landscapes and later by Caspar David Friedrich’s work, an artist of a different time.

T             Do you have any interest in romantic imagery? Your painting, although incurably optimistic, sometimes turns to an idea of ruins, even to the ruins theme itself.

R             It’s true. The ruin theme is romantic par excellence, isn’t it? It suggests an abandonment that inspires very seductive melancholy feelings. Caspar David Friedrich explores this wonderfully. Ruins speak of worlds that no longer exist, only in imagination and in the idealization of a golden age. [Nicolas] Poussin’s  and Claude Lorrain’s paintings speak of that ideal place and the longing for a bygone world, which also entails a tragic dimension. Besides, pictorially speaking, ruins are a very plastic and malleable, highly picturesque theme.

I have just made two very large paintings of ruins based on pictures taken at the Chapada Diamantina. Those scattered stones piled up in the middle of the woods are very favorable to paintings in general and to my painting in particular.

In fact, I have been seduced by that theme since the 1980s. The outdoor I made for Arte na rua II is indeed a stone bridge in ruins. Besides, at the time, I made a few little paintings based on World War ii film themes and mangled bodies, and in 2003 I made two gigantic paintings with Afghan ruins for Nando Reis’ concert. On second thought, the stone bridges I painted recently are also ruins, they are abandoned in the landscape, useless… I think abandonment is a point of attraction to me, just like Goeldi’s furniture in the middle of the street that I used in several paintings in the 1990s.

At the end of last year, I made two paintings of Roman ruins based on pictures taken at the Forum and the Palatin, just like Corot. More recently, I painted a marble sculpture of a Roman sarcophagus [pp. 144-145] and made marble heads from Notre-Dame, in short, some pictures explicitly related to that theme, though in these cases I think it’s different from what I did with the tsunami. The Roman ruins in my work are historic — or a-historic —, not a catastrophe. Their meaning is different; it refers to temporality, to no place at all.

T             A relic, isn’t it?

R             A relic. But not the tsunami. The tsunami is pure destruction.

T             Some of your recent pictures are more gestural, as if the weight of matter also showed as a working weight. Is there strength in the procedure too?

R             Undoubtedly, painting is a “cosa mentale”. But the physical experience in producing my works is intense. I feel muscle pain and exhaustion. The Onda do tsunami [Tsunami Wave] [pp. 146-149], for example, had to be practically remade after it was supposedly ready, and the color change involved the removal and mixing of 50 liters of paint. It was aggravating! It demands patience, resignation and the acceptance of matter properties. And it’s done without my knowing yet whether the work makes any sense or not. I say this with no demagogy and no pedantry. I only speak of the decision I made and whether it was the right one… Doubt is an added weight to the 50 liters of paint.

I also think the game I created borders the absurd, for it is about making illusionistic paintings in adverse conditions, with a materiality that makes the task more difficult… and the work obtains the herculean dimension of a prowess. And I think such a physical prowess gives the act of making art its concrete dimension. In that sense, I identify with Richard Serra. I have a hardcore side that always requires high intensity, one whose doubtless reality could be physically measured. I think I put those paradoxical amounts of paint in my paintings because I want to show that will… My painting resists my ideas and resists my imagination. My will fatally collides with matter resistance! And if on the one side it aggravates me, on the other it concretely gives me a reality principle! I need to submit to the material and often ask myself if it’s worth it. I generally like the result a lot and I am thrilled with the prowess! But nothing is guaranteed. If what I make is great art or not, I sincerely don’t know, and knowing it is out of my purview. To paraphrase Henry James: “We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art…”¹³

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