On the border

Taisa Palhares

The exhibition Rodrigo Andrade: painting and matter (1983-2014) brings together for the first time more than one hundred works offering a significant survey of Andrade’s production from the 1980s to 2014. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, among all the artists of a generation marked by the movement of return to painting, he was the one who remained dedicated almost exclusively to pictorial means. In this, however, there was neither simplistic allegiance to the idea of ​​painting as a superior activity, nor a defense of modernist purity in the face of contemporary art hybridism. On the contrary, from the very beginning, Andrade’s work reveals a sometimes-visceral determination to confront certainties that might constrain his activity, while doing so from within the categorical gesture of his practice.

The works chosen for the exhibition intend to present this movement in a chronological manner, while establishing relations between paintings of different phases or periods. If, with a more superficial reading, his production tends here towards abstract formalization, there to a return to figuration, its interpretation should not be made from a teleological perspective; if these stages appear to be opposite, there are nevertheless common characteristics that unify the works. As the artist suggests in an interview with art critic Tiago Mesquita: “I feel condemned to constant movement. […] One can speak of a pendular or circular movement, between figuration and abstraction, but the issues always come back on another level, like a spiral.”¹

It could be said that from his formative years, still in the 1970s, Rodrigo Andrade manifested an equal interest in art history and images and productions stemming from the culture industry. Already at the age of fifteen, a passion for comic book drawings and storytelling came hand in hand with a curiosity about artists such as Edward Hopper, Oswaldo Goeldi, and Giorgio Morandi.² In a way, the coexistence of such disparate references constitutes the visual amalgam at the root of his poetics, to which he would later add cinema, photography, popular painting, kitsch vulgarity, and a genuine interest in ordinary and anonymous images, as well as many other artists of different periods.³

This interconnection cannot be framed in terms of influences. Neither does his work carry out the somewhat empty exercise of citation and appropriation that marked part of 1980s painting. His interest and importance lie in the fact that, starting with a contaminated visuality, which neither presents itself as pure, nor is oriented towards establishing hierarchies, Andrade brings to the pictorial field things that coexists in daily life in a disordered manner. However, if these paintings refer to the contemporary world’s trivialized circuit of images – in which a Van Gogh painting circulates with the same reach and speed as photographs documenting great tragedies – Andrade does not reaffirm our cultural universe’s diagnosis of superficial identity. His work, in truth, could be considered within the context of an aesthetic of negativity, in which what is seen as equivalent, and therefore as banal and ordinary, is transformed into the non-identical. This estrangement derives from the presence of a materiality that, at least since the paintings made by applying pairs of paint blocks on white surfaces (1999-2009), is restricted to the most basic pictorial element: oil paint. The exacerbated and heterogeneous materiality of Andrade’s works from the 1980s, like the collages and paintings on blinds, reappears then in the density of the paint. Its physicality is undeniably excessive, affirmative. And in this way, it repositions the border between art and the appearance of the world.

In the same interview with Tiago Mesquita, Rodrigo Andrade notes that the ambiguity of his works derives from the fact that spaces coexist in them without disappearing into each other: the space of the world and the illusory space of the canvas. Citing historian Johan Huizinga’s study of playfulness, Andrade describes in a clear and definitive way what is essential to his poetics: the play between the imaginary and the concrete, the illusionist trait of all art and, simultaneously, the fact of being artifice, a thing made of physical matter.⁴

The corporeal presence of matter, whose potency, however confined to preset contours, never manages to lose an aspect akin to that of a living and informed organism, oblivious to the artist’s ultimate intention, also leads us to another fundamental component of Andrade’s work: pleasure. If, since the second half of the eighteenth-century at least, aesthetics defines art as “disinterested pleasure,” one therefore different from any other form of manual or utilitarian work, it is in the subsequent century that sensorial exploration shaped the first manifestations of mass culture entertainment. Pleasure that was mental, incorporeal, and pure, quickly became sensory attraction. While still removed from the “light” pleasures of mass culture, modern art would not remain oblivious to the surface seductions of this new world; witness Edouard Manet’s flat naked body of Olympia (1863).

Without wishing to revisit the origins of our era, the sensory element in art appears to play a special role in Rodrigo Andrade. The bringing together of these works reveals, in the key of the above-mentioned playfulness, that if, on the one hand, they attract us to the point where we often feel an irresistible urge to touch their surfaces, on the other, the density of their matter also distances us from what we know, from what is similar to our everyday world. This movement of attraction and repulsion becomes clear in the series created for the São Paulo Bienal of 2010. The large canvases of Matéria noturna (Nocturnal matter) [pp. 130-135] are painted from ordinary photographs: night cityscapes, pictures of the artist’s studio, natural landscapes; that is, ordinary images on which Andrade uses a stencil to apply a thick layer of black paint. This process, which at first attracts the viewer physically, highlights the concreteness of what is represented as illusory, while simultaneously repulsing, to the extent that the density of black matter repositions the opacity of the world. We can almost conceive of a negative pleasure.

So, it is not a question here of defining painting by removing it from what is entertaining and superficial in contemporary society, an attempt to save it with a sterile seriousness that would permanently distance it from life. But it is also not a matter of plunging completely into the transient banality of that same life, without demanding some kind of differentiation. As I had already remarked in an earlier text on the artist,⁵ in Rodrigo Andrade’s work there is a “relative autonomy” in that art does not become the world, and the world is not aestheticized by becoming art, although they are in constant dialogue and approximation.
 

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The earliest painting in the exhibition dates from 1983 and represents the studio in the collective workshop that Rodrigo Andrade shared with his friends Fábio Miguez, Paulo Monteiro, Carlito Carvalhosa, and Nuno Ramos between 1982 and 1985, an address that would soon lend its name and identity to the group, known as Casa 7.⁶ The only observation painting in the exhibition, the work presents a recurring theme in the history of art that would later be revisited in other small canvases, such as Atelier abandonado (Abandoned studio) (1985) [p.113] and O gabinete do senhor Oliva (Mr. Oliva’s cabinet) (1985) [p.112], or, even, the large painting from the 2010 Bienal series that is based on a photograph of his current studio, Interior escuro (Dark interior) (2010) [p.134]. These are places where the artist’s presence is indicial, evoked in the randomly scattered objects that give the impression of chaotic accumulation, of things fallen into disuse, or simply abandoned (chairs, tables, papers, chassis, frames, etc.). Closed environments that reflect intimacy and solitude.

It is with the synthetic enamel drawings on Kraft paper [pp.106-111] that Andrade begins to work in larger formats, influenced by German neo-expressionist artists that he encountered at the 1983 Bienal, such as Markus Lüpertz, whose vulgarity of painting, suggestive of something done quickly and without great elucubrations, would exercise an attractive force on Andrade’s work. Or the Canadian Philip Guston, a constant inspiration in his production. Contact with the work of these painters freed up the artist’s own work. Especially in the drawings, the interiors appear fragmented and an uncontrollable force seems to expand beyond the surface. Matter, while still diluted, gains unmistakable presence with the bright and drippy appearance of synthetic enamel. Two years later, Andrade is invited to participate in the 18th São Paulo Bienal, where his gestural and expressionist oil paintings were part of the “Great canvas” [p.120-121].

Andrade’s first break with neo-expressionist figuration happened in 1986, when he had his first solo show at Galeria Subdistrito in São Paulo. In it he used collage, and his materials, previously confined to paint, began to incorporate rough elements like rubber, lead, and cardboard. There is a lowering of tone, and the expressionist gesture is tempered by the composition of the forms, somewhat reminiscent of geometric rationality [pp. 87-88, 104]. A will to structure amorphous matter also appears in two large paintings with blinds from 1990 [pp. 100-103].

Still within the first period of Andrade’s production, in 1994 he produced a group of paintings that anticipated a transition effectively realized in the late 1990s. In the series dubbed Goeldiana [pp.92, 96-97], the figurative elements are surrounded by a dense spatiality of flat, predominantly black monochromes. The relationship between surface and depth becomes problematic and the figures lose volume, compelled by the entropic space. Gesture becomes more restrained, matter becomes impenetrable.

Exhibited for only the second time since they were made, these paintings establish a direct connection with Andrade’s most recent work. In them we can already see the movement towards contraction of matter that will take place in the period categorized as “abstract”, as in Untitled, 1998 [p.83]. In the “abstract” series, begun in 1999, Andrade develops a new kind of procedure that would characterize his later output. The artist transforms the figures into geometric blocks of pure color, applied to white canvas using a stencil. A radical gesture that appears to aspire to a ground zero of painting. Beyond the whole question that these canvases raise about the relationship between figure and ground, plane and depth, picture space and world space,⁷ the work frees itself from exaggerated gesturality and rediscovers a direct graphic quality that was already present in the first works, notably the ones on Kraft paper. These polarities become reciprocally determined, extending the range of action of the physically delimited surface of the canvas, while the color compresses into forceful volumes of paint.

The blocks are placed in pairs of two or four, forming ordinary, banal shapes: circles and rectangles that allow for slight variations in size, volume, and edge contours. The universality of such forms is closer to the standardized objects of industry and design than to the metaphysics of abstract geometric painting of the early twentieth century.

These works’ playfulness is based on the relationship that the blocks establish with each other, with the surrounding space, and with the body of the spectator.⁸ Interiority here is reduced to a minimum. The color palette does contain great intrinsic novelty, remaining constant from the beginning of the artist’s career (with the predominance of meat pink, black, yellow, blue, gray, white, green, beige, purple, orange, and red). However, the colors gain unprecedented concreteness and completeness. They become direct, immediate, ostensible. Simultaneously pure matter and visual sensation, intermittent passage between visual perception and tactile perception, these colors are not shy about establishing contact, and institute a permanent movement of reciprocal determination, despite being complete within their own individuality.

In the exhibition, this group of works joins the Bicromias series (2014), in which the artist reinterprets well-known photographs, transforming them into compositions built by combining two colors [pp.57-61, 150]. While on one hand they evoke the reproducible and anonymous character of Andy Warhol’s work,⁹ on the other they highlight the importance that the stencil technique developed for the abstract paintings would have in the following phase of Andrade’s work, when the artist returns to figuration, though with pre-existing images.

In early 2009, Rodrigo Andrade begins to make paintings from his own photographs. This return to figuration marks a new period in which the assertive materiality of the earlier paintings is in tension with the idea of ​​representation. The first group of this new series of paintings, the abovementioned Matéria noturna series, is exhibited at the 29th São Paulo Bienal (2010). These are nocturnal landscapes that represent the abandonment and silence of the city. There is no copy of the image, but rather the incorporation of the haunting character of nighttime into the opacity of matter.

In general, what is perceived in these figurative paintings, made from photographs (be they his, or not) and film stills, is the questioning of verisimilitude, reestablishing, now by other means, the game between illusion and the dense masses of paint. Curiously, it is also through the appropriation of images that the artist rediscovers the History of Art. Oswaldo Goeldi, Pieter Bruegel, Gustave Courbet, Camille Corot, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, John Constable, Johannes Vermeer, Caspar David Friedrich, Claude Monet: reminiscences that reappear in a photograph of the Tsunami, a road to the coast, travel photos, or personal records of familiar sites. Again, the seemingly banal invades pictorial space, in a movement tensioned with the conventions of painting. In this way, both the ordinary and the conventional are displaced. After all, it is on this border that Rodrigo Andrade’s work wants to live.
 
Taisa Palhares is curator.

 
Text originally published in the catalogue Rodrigo Andrade: pintura e matéria (Rodrigo Andrade: painting and material) (1983-2014), curatorship and text: Taisa Palhares; text: Michael Asbury. São Paulo: Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2017. Exhibition held at Estação Pinacoteca (Pinacoteca Station) from December 9, 2017 to March 12, 2018.