Alvaro Negro

ÁLVARO NEGRO

ÁLVARO NEGRO Lalín, Espanha, 1973 Exposições individuais selecção: Natureza! Estás Soa? (Sala Municipal de exposições de Palexco . A Coruña, Espanha, 2011), Abro a xanela e respiro o Aire fresco da fin do mundo (Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa.

Lisboa, Portugal, 2010), Reflexos Híbridos (Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea . Lisboa, Portugal, 2007), Arquitectura de sons infraleves (Galeria Mário Sequeira . Parada de Tibães, Braga, Portugal, 2006), Exposições Colectivas selecção: La Colección (Fundación Barrié . A Coruña, Espanha, 2011) VIII Edição do Concurso Bienal de fotografia Purificación Garcia, (Museu da Cidade. Lisboa Lisbon, Portugal, Palácio de Cristal. Porto, Portugal 2011) 89 Km. Colección CGAC (Comissariada por Virginia Torrente, Marco, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo . Vigo España; CGAC, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea . Santiago de Compostela, España 2010) La pieza que falta (comissariada por David Barro, Factoria Compostela . Santiago de Compostela, Espanha, 2010), Ressonância Visual (comissariada por David Barro, Paços da Cultura . S. João da Madeira, Portugal, 2010), Becas de creación artística en el extranjero 07 (MACUF – Museo de Arte Contemporânea Unión Fenosa . A Coruña, Espanha, 2009), En Construcción 2 (Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza . Vigo, Espanha, 2009) Teleprompter. Novas Camuflaxes do pictórico (Centro Torrente Ballester, Ferrol . A Coruña, Espanha), Puntos de Luz (Fundación Barrié de la Maza . A Coruña, Espanha), Antes de ayer y passado mañana; o lo que puede ser pintura hoy (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Union Fenosa – Macuf . A Coruña, Espanha, 2009), Parangolé Museo Patio Herreriano . Valladolid, Espanha, 2008.

Lalín, Spain 1973 Solo shows selection: Natureza! Estás Soa? (Sala Municipal de exposições de Palexco . A Coruña, Spain, 2011), Abro a xanela e respiro o Aire fresco da fin do mundo (Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa. Lisbon, Portugal, 2010), Reflexos Híbridos (Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea . Lisbon, Portugal, 2007), Arquitectura de sons infraleves (Galeria Mário Sequeira . Parada de Tibães, Braga, Portugal, 2006), Group shows selection: La Colección (Fundación Barrié . A Coruña, Espanha, 2011) VIII Edição do Concurso Bienal de fotografia Purificación Garcia, (Museu da Cidade. Lisbon, Portugal, Palácio de Cristal. Porto, Portugal 2011) 89 Km. Colección CGAC (Curated by Virginia Torrente, Marco, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo . Vigo España; CGAC, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea . Santiago de Compostela, España 2010) La pieza que falta (comissariada por David Barro, Factoria Compostela . Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2010), Ressonância Visual (Curated by David Barro, Paços da Cultura . S. João da Madeira, Portugal, 2010), Becas de creación artística en el extranjero 07 (MACUF – Museo de Arte Contemporânea Unión Fenosa . A Coruña, Spain, 2009), En Construcción 2 (Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza . Vigo, Spain, 2009) Teleprompter. Novas Camuflaxes do pictórico (Centro Torrente Ballester, Ferrol . A Coruña, Spain), Puntos de Luz (Fundación Barrié de la Maza . A Coruña, Spain), Antes de ayer y passado mañana; o lo que puede ser pintura hoy (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Union Fenosa – Macuf . A Coruña, Spain, 2009), Parangolé Museo Patio Herreriano . Valladolid, Espanha, 2008.

Álvaro Negro, S/ título, 2010, Enamel on aluminium, 86 x 56 cm

Ă lvaro Negro, S/ tĂ­tulo (da sĂŠrie Abro a xanela e respiro o aire fresco da fin do mundo), 2007/9, Lambda print on kodak endura paper, 6 (44,7 x 25,15 cm)

Ă lvaro Negro, S/ tĂ­tulo (da sĂŠrie Abro a xanela e respiro o aire fresco da fin do mundo), 2007/9, Lambda print on kodak endura paper, 5 (44,7 x 25,15 cm)

Ă lvaro Negro, S/ tĂ­tulo, 2007, Enamel on aluminium, 100 x 357 cm

Ă lvaro Negro, S/ tĂ­tulo, 2007, Enamel on aluminium, 100 x 300 cm

Ă lvaro Negro, Las sombras mendigas del escenario de Alex Zika , 2004, Lambda print on aluminium, 4 (80 x 100 cm)

Álvaro Negro, S/ título, 2010, Enamel on aluminium, 86 x 56 cm

Álvaro Negro, S/ título, 2010, Enamel on aluminium, 86 x 56 cm

DIGRESSIONS ABOUT A SLOW PAINTER. A TALK TO ÁLVARO NEGRO David Barro On first appearances, Álvaro Negro’s career would seem to be a gathering of influences, a work full of bends, fissures and movements in new directions.

It is so if we pay attention to certain formal aspects, but actually this supposed profusion of ideas and resolutions may be solved considering a few obsessions, which are finally optimised through a wide knowledge of the history of the art world, going back in many cases to its very origins.

In particular, I would like to define him as a slow painter. He is able to hide the details to give us a world based on minimum, an opening which reveals his concern about the nuance and the almost imperceptible things arising whenever the viewer’s contemplation becomes intense. Therefore, in many cases it shows a certain monotony that is, at least, intentionally creating another way of seeing, of feeling; other kind of perception where the attitude that arises from its creation is more important than the place. Sometimes, Álvaro Negro plays at dissecting the movement –never completely– changing the time in order to freeze the highest tension, the pin of light. This condensed style, which goes with his pictorial images, is now the main character of his video work, where he also practices that intention to divide the time of the image in order to get a wider awareness of the object.

To sum up, his strategy consists in involving us in a defiant perceptive exercise, which is solved, in many cases, by looking beyond the images, until turning them into unconnected ones and therefore creating a different understanding.

We could also define Bill Viola as a slow painter. He occasionally revealed his preference and interest in the Persian poet and mystic, Rumi, from the 13th century.

He thought that new ways of perception come to life due to a necessity; if we broaden our necessity we will, therefore, increase our perception, imagination and desire. Seeing is thinking and the art of vision is, according to this rule, an art of contemplation. We fix an object or nature with our way of seeing, we prolong the moment and everything takes control of the

psyche, it changes –remember Berger-. The patient wait, the intense observation of reality extracts from nature unnoticeable effects, and I suppose that artists such as Álvaro Negro wonder if we actually think about the audience. Perhaps the key relies on the fact that the visual is constantly transforming and growing, it is the image throughout time, the image in movement.

The proposal could be a broadening strategy, similar to the one which leads many artists to employ poetic language, because poetry broadens the meaning and language experience. In order to solve a time full of images, Álvaro Negro tries to extend some of them, while others try to divide them. That is the reason why, more than ever, in his last works he presents an expanded world, like a drug capable of increasing our perception and distorting the conventions of time and space.

We are talking about retina persistence, about a kind of expanded time that we find from Andy Warhol to David Claerbout. In their works, the image dominates spreading its own time, creating a tension that comes from his particular manner of breaking the image, playing with the inherent past of photography in order to spread its possibilities in a strictly cinematographic time. All is present within a kind of condensed, brief and dull narrative.

However, after our relationship with the image, after the visual experience, we become aware of different times, which reveal a memory, a vision almost unnoticeable. Another slow painter would be Mark Lewis. His works are simple static shots which depend upon the running time. In Algonquin Park, a static shot shows a landscape covered by fog, which then clears up with time until we see a wood and a lake shore. I suppose that, with that monk overcome by the immensity, Friedrich wanted to show something like that. Anyway, we must conclude that time is no longer the same as it was.

“Everything related to time has changed. The time of the work of art, the time of the viewer, the time of the artist... Valerie’s sentence: “during the last twenty years, neither matter, space, nor time have remained what they always used to be”, included in the quote that Benjamin put at the beginning of The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, has changed into “our technologies constantly reduce the intervals of time and space between the

operations”1.

Following this advice, the virtual reader will suppose that talking to Álvaro Negro is also an act of patience, an act which changes for hours until it becomes never-ending, expanded in a eternal loop. Álvaro Negro follows his convictions in a process that means he constantly doubts about the situation and his objectives. That is the reason why, in this case, this slow painter, who is capable of working with video and photography, and also capable of returning to painting –either in or out of the canvas- translates that patience into an act of reflection, into maturity at the time of resolution and risky advance; to sum up, into an intention of being a lively and restless artist.

In this talk we have tried to reveal the exegesis of his work and that way of understanding the art as attitude; from his first minimalist works, where the painting started at the edge of the picture and a line of dull drops accidentally made up the image, to the liveliness of his paintings on aluminium; from the austerity of a group of collages of light translated into a dull frontal painting, to the flat and fast display of Luzpincolour; or from the return to mural painting to the confirmation of that interest in architecture as an integral part of the context of his production in his video works.

David Barro: More than once I praised your

attitude towards painting, your continuous wondering about why keep on painting, that firm intention about reviewing the orthodox in painting. After a doubtless point of inflexion in your career, such as your recent stay in London, at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design… I think that it would be very important to start with two questions at the same time: do you still consider yourself a painter? In your opinion, what is the place of painting, nowadays? Álvaro Negro: With regard to the first question, as a good Galician, I would answer yes and no.

Undoubtedly, my learning process has developed through painting, both on a conceptual and on a practical level, about what art is and its ‘performance’ within contemporary visual culture. From the beginning, in the last years at University, my work has been developing from an ontological analysis, I would even say ‘deconstructive’, about what is painting, the picture, and most of all, the “pictorial” image in relation with the contemporary context and the new techniques of image production. In fact, I started by the end, with the edge of the painting, producing works that talked and were produced from the limit of painting. I would tell you that I am a painter because the concepts of my work come from a dialectic relationship, sometimes positive and at other times negative, with regard to the environment and its ‘history’… but on the other hand I have always

Álvaro Negro, Zobra, 2006/2007, Videoprojection, two channels, DVD, colour, sound, 18’49’’

been careful not to fall into merely formalist positions, which led to ‘the painting talking about the painting’; this would mean a return to the essentialist principles of Greenberg that, of course, no longer relate to contemporary problems. So this then brings me to your second question, that current painting has no longer to worry about its essence, not even in a ‘reductionist’ or ‘expansionist’ way; as Marcaccio would say, it can only be a starting point to get to other places… and without painters having to worry any more about what we are. That is the reason why ‘painting exhibitions’ tend to fail, as they always start from the premise of having to identify “that” which is special from the painting of one period or other. That is, the curators keep on applying types of formalist historicism, and they assimilate the contemporaneous as one more step in the series of styles which can be easy to assimilate inside the traditional media such as painting. I am currently no longer worried about whether I am a painter or not, I am only interested in building images with the most suitable technique.

DB: I think this answer involves not only my two questions but also many others, which could lead to a discussion as well. Anyway, there are two highly significant sentences; on the one hand you confess to having started at the end, at the edge of the painting, which reveals your relationship with art as a body which must be continually auscultated –perhaps we could see your last works as a daily approach to those history paintings of large scale which are now being projected by light– and, on the other hand, you pay special attention to the nearly dialectic relationship with the history of painting, while you are not worried about whether you are a painter or not. It is curious to see that now that you are starting to use the figurative in your last light boxes for the first time, it makes you go near to the spectral, as if, in order to reach reality, you needed to start from fantasy. As always, you use the light as spectrum, like that disturbing moment at dawn when somebody has not gone to bed yet; Maurice Blanchot talks about insomnia in The Songs of Maldoror of Lautréamont –“the hallucinatory heaviness of a night without sleep”-. You talk about trying to build images closely bounded to a world of light. However, in your last works –precisely light boxes- you play with the negative, with shadows. Do you have the feeling that there is a certain kind of fear when representing a body

and, therefore you are looking for its simple projection?

How do you understand that game of absence / presence?

AN: In chiaroscuro lies the essence of visual conception in the western tradition. It is one of the most obvious examples of the dialectic that we conceptualise and connect with the world: between the Dionysian and Apollonian, between the Iconoclast and the Iconolatry, beauty and ugliness, light and shadow... In fact the myths of the origin of painting –Pliny the Elder– are based on the painting of the shadow contour, on that spectral image which has taken the most varied meanings through history; since Plato’s cave a phenomenology of another way of seeing was created, which has tried to apprehend the human being and its relationship with the world. In his great book, A Short History of the Shadow, Stoichita makes a wonderful journey through the history of art through the representation of the shadow as a metonymy of representation itself, of the soul, of the phantom... but also of the own body of the painter which maintains itself as the absent character of the mise-enscène –at least up to Las Meninas of Velázquez-.

Curiously, just after my ‘drop paintings’ –which, as I have said before, were about ‘the end of painting’– I returned to the starting point, towards paintings which were just chiaroscuros, collages of light and shadows which made me dive into a much more historic conception of painting, I would even dare to say ‘baroque’. It is not by chance that this inflection point –Luzpin series- emerges just after working with Lucio Muñoz in one of his mural paintings. I remember that this experience made me a much more quiet painter; suddenly the paintings were not finished in a day, but the process started before and away from the painting, the image was created apart from the making process, on the computer, and through the screen. The crucial point was not the change of technology, but that separation between image and painting. Suddenly the painting appeared to me as a way of ‘printing’ the image, and not of ‘creating it’.

With regard to the history of painting, there was a moment when I felt it like a burden that I could hardly bear, like a wonderful but labyrinthine cage, where it would be impossible to find the present, our present.

Both in the series of Cuadros Europeo as in Luzpin, I struggled with its history and its shadows... then the Pop came.

Álvaro Negro, Cortex, 2007, Enamel paint on perpex, light box, 185 x 100 cm

DB: When you talk about contour I understand that you mean the lines defining the image, capturing it; when you talk about pause, it implies waiting for a result. Bill Viola confesses that he went into the world of video in order to capture the image and let it expand its own time, the time that the image imposes, the time that wants to stay. Do you feel something similar to that?

Yes, time is something really controversial in painting.

In fact, sometimes I thought that a painting was no more than a pause in the phenomenological process of apprehension of the image. In fact, my use of video comes due to the haunt of reflecting those images that in painting remain as trails of the absent, of what the image was a second, an hour, a day before. Time is one of the topics, which currently I am most interested in, and Viola already said: “duration is to consciousness as what light is to the eye”. Regarding this subject, the cinema and the video have incorporated an impossible element for painting: the fourth dimension, the course of the time. Video allows me to experience the conditions where the image emerges related to the action, to build a certain state of conscienceawareness about the very act of seeing-visualizingcontemplating-reflecting.

What you are suggesting brings us to another more important point. That is the position of the viewer. I think that the arts tend to work more as a science of behaviour, than of simple contemplation. It is obvious that the images today have a four-dimensional shape and they have life, they take on behaviour. That temporal intensity, in your case, I think that still has a lot to do with that patient painter you admit to having been before; in that way I see your work as closely linked to what Berger advises in order to reach reality; that deep observation of nature leads to a change in our initial way of seeing that same nature. I have no doubts that you go on playing with the imperceptible, with that ‘pin of light’...

AN: Of course, I consider that that “science of behaviour” is the one, which brings close to the creative processes of a mathematician, a physicist or an artist. After all, we all fight against the real through hypotheses which can drive to logarithms, formulas or artworks. They make us understand our situation in

time and space, our social and cultural behaviours with regard to civilization. In this way I remember the impression that the artist Jürgen Partenheimer left me –with whom I had the opportunity to share a workshop– his texts are a lesson about what the creative process is in itself, that ‘other way of seeing’ reality. I would also like to mention José Ángel Valente, Roberto Juarroz or Peter Hanke, writers who were of great influence in the creation of my way of ‘my eye’. In this way, I admit that there is always something we go back to, series of images which repeat themselves almost involuntarily, the ones to which we seem to be inevitably bounded, even when we intend to reach other objectives. Perhaps it is in that lack of will, in that disappearance of the ego, where paradoxically we are able to identify ourselves better. At least that has been my feeling. Therefore, Luzpincolour represented a step towards the lightness of the game, of the painter of archetypal shapes, which, step by step, were becoming mine through ‘the repetition and the difference’.

DB: It is obvious that we never stop being ourselves and that our obsessions emerge in very different ways; that is why we always dream similar nightmares which, when not the same or, if of different situations, always coincide with the same ending. Tàpies remember –when discussing with Valente– that Sheldrake mentions many cases about scientists who made their discoveries during whilst dreaming. Precisely in a conversation with Partenheimer he quoted Juan Ramón Jiménez: “don’t run, go slowly, because where you want to go is only to yourself”. He talked about the spiritual journey, that makes you travel in order to reach something you did not expect to, but which maybe was predestined. Anyway, I think that Luzpincolour came out of necessity; it is an explosion of plain light that had to emerge. I think that, most of all; it is a product of behaviour that is based on discoveries.

Was there in you a necessity to stop being a “slow painter” and to look that, which shocks the impact of first sight?

AN: In fact, I remember that in the exhibition Novos Camiñantes I noticed that my work was the least contemporary. The Luzpin series, as I explained

before, came from the assimilation of classical works and, unavoidably, this meant that in their chromatic tenebrism the works were too invisible, too silent for the contemporary context.

DB: It is true that former colours, heirs of the Spanish classicist tradition, made your painting very hard, quite dull. This austere climate, baroque, –that I think returns in some of your last works, although in a different way, through that obsessive presence of chiaroscuro- initiated your movement towards another type of new surface and, obviously, chromatic taste, and in addition the painting became smaller...

AN: Luzpincolour represented an evolution, both chromatically and in the surface, due to the flatness of the matt acrylic and the removal of metonymic traces of the action of painting through the use of the paint roller. That kind of composition and design did not change, but the evolution described before had given the images a much more interactive character with the contemporary eye. Also, the planning of the paintings in determined closed groups, in their interrelation began to be my daily modus operandi.

It is not that the painting became insufficient, but I would say that it was losing its meaning with regard to the individual and independent identity, and in favour of a conception much more polyptych of the work. This began to grow and develop almost like a family tree. In this constant game of relationships it was obvious that the architecture, the wall, the space among the paintings, its lighting, etc., were having a more important role in the exhibitions. I think that all of this was implicit in Achtung Luzpin, a transition work between the two series, and that represented a kind of “ironic shout” where my conceptual and my existential position are summarized, in that moment of crisis. It was a hard period where I had to re-evaluate a lot of “syntactic” elements of the work, because I was fully conscious of the fact that something was going wrong in the “interaction with the spectator.” Looking at it in retrospect, in this work there is a concentration of many conceptual and technical approaches that I developed afterwards.

Achtung Luzpin was –through this amalgam created by a painting, mural painting, a video and a light box– my personal manifesto of pictorial beliefs and

intentions.

DB: That amalgam in many of your approaches ends up by being a kind of outburst, of excess, of spread –that polyptych conception that you talk about has just clearly been seen in that gauge of art which is the Whitney Biennial, and curiously in the recovery or proliferation of the drawing. For me, the drippings in the Torrente Ballester, your photographs and videos of Wall A, or your mural artworks… they follow in the same direction of artistic exploration, and playing with the surrounding space –that in many cases it does not contain it due to the outburst-. Behind all of that is hidden an intention to value the context, to make it visible and important; but also, I insist, that there is an interest for establishing relationships between the artwork and the spectator, between art and reality.

Everything leads us towards tradition except the overcoming of the concept of the frame. It is also important that this necessity allows you to keep on taking the light as a generator of experiences, a light that coincides in that pictorial intention. The spectator feels the gestures, every single silence... I think of a mutual devotion –Adrian Schiess- and I would like to know if you already have the answer to one of the questions that you were wondering about yourself some years ago: Is the painting able to answer both artistic and social problems which emerged from the context, from our everyday?

AN: Architecture is no longer the neutral container of the works in order to change into the origin of them, in the topic I wanted to discuss. In particular, the exhibition Miradas Virxes marked this transition from the canvas towards the wall, and I remember that in the text of that exhibition you mentioned one quotation from Jessica Stockholder which summarizes the topic: “architecture gives meaning to the historical structure of painting”. In a certain way I think that this relationship is retroactive, painting can have the capacity to change space, as if it was a skin, and give it a concrete meaning. The history of architecture is also the history of our conception of space and it involves “inhabiting” it. Architecture implies a group of psychological questions that can vary depending on several factors, and painters such as Schiess prove that this relationship between painting and its context is one of the paths where architecture escapes from the

tired formalist speech of Greenberg and their followers. In this kind of proposals –and now I answer the last part of your question– painting continues to prove itself relevant, I would even say ‘necessary’.

DB: I understand anyway, that limits are increasingly blurred due to a clear influence among all artistic disciplines, even with other ones that are not artistic. Everything is a road of assumption of different patterns. Yves Klein simply showed the emptiness, but Bruce Nauman, Dan Flavin or James Turrel –just to cite three artist linked to Minimal Art- will look for the architectonic involvement as a visual resource, for the illusion of the perception and certain mystery provoked by lightening effect –whether natural or artificial-.

In this chromatic expression we talk about painting, which was always current, although nobody considered them painters. If you say that painting is like skin, the light would tan it, tone it down and give it a personality.

Because of that you talk about psychology and I talked before about behaviour, because, basically, we do this out of visual generosity, of a virgin way of seeing which is capable of assuming that fifty metres of objects can become a painting. I am thinking, of course, about Jessica Stockholder.

AN: We ought to start talking more about genres than about models. In fact, the Minimal Art is further from that tradition related to painting or sculpture. They produced ‘specific objects’ which make us aware of the importance of empty space, the value of context, whilst they avoided all those kinds of historic prejudices, which would condition us to see their works as paintings or sculptures. In fact, you yourself have associated certain light effects from the Turrel, Flavin or Naumann league of the pictorial. Why is this automatic bound between illusion and painting, between light and painting? Of course there is something in there which is historically coded, and perhaps those models are the ones which contemporary artists should investigate.

Precisely I now remember the Olafur Eliasson installation at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. Is it possible to talk about painting in this case? I think that in a conversation with the artist and the architects Herzog & de Meuron, he said that his reform had transform-dissolved the space in itself, that they had changed the building into a powerful representation of itself, that is, into an image. I believe that the participation of Eliasson exaggerates even more this architecturalvisual perception. As a spectator, I do remember that the

visualization of the works goes from the image, nearly bidimensional that we have from the western entrance, to the four-dimensionality that we can experience by reaching the other side of the room, where the “sun” becomes a lamp and the image-representation reveals its artifice. From this point of view, we see the audience as if they were looking from inside of the painting, as if the spaces were inverted or even were similar. Both sides of the mirror are the same, from the entrance of the museum everything is just an image, and we, the characters who inhabitate the painting... are amazed. When I left the Tate, that effect of “representing in real time” was transferred to the city. The light, in the constant gradations caused by typical London climate changes, now illuminated other big painting: the powerful economic architecture of the City, the Thames, that mirror of water which reminds me of the chromatic shades and effects of Turner thunderstorms in the sea. The city was also image, scene where the only real thing is, in fact, the weather, which Eliasson mentions in the title of his project. In this representational transition outside-inside the museum where –in my opinion– lies the main interest in the piece, and which caused me to reflect upon how artists “frame” reality and change it into image.

There is still much left to reflect about “the contexts,” in fact, some of the works that I created in London were closely linked to that. At the exhibition in Saint Martins, the video Centre Point –whose background image is a zoom over the highest offices of the emblematic tower of Tottenham Court Road– was shown under a window through which you could see the “real” building; that parallelism was what gave meaning to the piece. As a game of frame inside a frame, the reality was showed as image both on the projection and on the window. Paradoxically, people could talk about a pictorial view –without painting– which is maintained through the idea of frame, in this case architectonic. Therefore, the video made me pay more attention to the performance, stage, place, time and length.

DB: Everything happens in a field of action much bigger than the one delimited by the picture. Quoting Tàpies, I would say, “the topic can be found, therefore, in the picture or it can only be located inside spectator’s minds.” As in music –Cage–, in poetry –Valente–, architecture or plastic arts, that empty space, which I would like to interpret as silence, gains an essential importance for the development of one artwork. On the other hand, in 1966 Joseph Kosuth presented a black square with white letters printed on it.

It meant a definition of painting; the target was to find balances by its limits. Meanwhile, the Support-Surface claimed that painting meant much more than using the paintbrush and that it also consisted of showing a painter experiment with his tools, taking into account the exhibition process. For them, the pictorial space comprises all the theoretical and practical space of the artwork, from the creator to the spectator. Francisco de Holanda said: “I would say that painting is a declaration of thought.” And that is what I meant to say, everything depends on that degree of our visual generosity as spectators. If you want we could understand illusion as generosity –illusion is a suggestion or a trick of the senses, but also a pleasure– and the light as lighting –which makes everything surrounding us visible–... in this way it is easy to understand that automatic connection between the illusory and the painted, between what is illuminated and represented. With respect to Olafur Eliasson and his participation at the Tate, I do believe that in a certain moment we could talk about painting outside of painting, but I would rather talk about the experience of painting far away from painting; that would be the physical aspect of light, that a body generates, as Eliasson says, “not in a sculptural but in a subconscious sense”.

AN: Eliasson himself admits that he does not care about delimiting if the physical experiences that he presents to the spectator are exclusively ‘artistic’. It is our conscious or, as you say, generosity, that is in play when perceiving something or ourselves. At the same time, the artist constantly insists on showing him the trick, the mechanism which generates that image a priori unreal; and according to him, this is what makes possible the disappearance of landscape painter. In painting, exactly the same happens, the great masters painted “illusions” and at the same time they made evident the real painting and “mechanisms of representation.” In fact, I think that in general the audience assimilated the artwork of Eliasson with many remains of pictorial codes, that is, as landscape. The spectator reacted nearly in the same way as Sunday painters in la Grande Jatte of Seraut: he or she played, talked, thought over and, most of all, sunbathed; he or she recognized him or herself as the main character of the representation –without it the space would become the reflection of his or her own emptiness-.

DB: It is curious, but Camille Pisarro had talked about this artwork of light, about how his pointillist performance intrigues and make people think: “they realized that there must be something inside it”. Seurat also shows this trick, but I understand that mentioning that work is produced by the natural behaviour of Tate’s spectators, who use that public space as a garden, after all, for a long time gardens have been played the role of a background picture, as that crhoma which Eliasson unawarely creates. However, I would like to make a change in the conversation in order to rescue, perhaps, the least known part of your work, the one made just before leaving for Saint Martins College of Art. I am referring to the series of paintings on aluminium that you started creating, I would say, step by step, as transition elements, that will gain an absolute pictorial maturity. They seemed to have helped as bridge or strategy to, step by step, camouflage the very painting; and also in order to reach a “richterian” kind of blur like a fluid transformation.

In this way Richter will admit that he blurs “in order that things are equal in or without their importance (...) I am only interested in grey surfaces, passages and colour spectrum, pictorial spaces, overlappings and fixings. If I had the chance to renounce the object as the holder all of that structure, I would spend my time on abstract painting.” I also think about the immensity which floods Friedrich’s paintings and how in his recent works that lighting discussion turns out to be the main character, though it was always present. I would also like to pay attention to the irregular series –or, at least, not exploited– of aluminium and to that blur which creates an effect of movement similar those peripheral visions of David Reed, especially sensitive to the movement. You have always had a special interest in expanding media and painting in itself, for drawing the outline of the panoramic in order to contrast the blurred and the bright dispersing painting in geographic and topographic ways, for the tense, vibrating motif...

AN: Obviously, the first thing that caught my interest about the aluminium as a holder was its lighting characteristic, how it reflected the light and even the space in a blurred manner. Of course, Richter’s style or even those of Jason Martin or Helmut Dorner were in my mind; but also Moholy Nagy, the authentic predecessor who in the 40’s worked on in various artworks the different possibilities that plastic gave to “painting with light.” His great modernity may also be noticed when he interprets the white square of Malévich, as a simile of the cinematographic screen, and a symbol of transition “from colour-painting to light-painting.” From

this point, we could also continue with the family tree to another of my weaknesses: the photography of the cinema rooms of Sugimoto, many of them built between the 20’s and the 30’s, when the cinema was a symbol of modernity. The idea was to represent light through a photograph with the same time of showing as the film: “I imagined that the film showed would burn until leaving an overexposed screen, of blinding white... It would be a kind of religious experience, something like an appearance of the Virgin. However, ironically, intense light which shines in the darkness is a Hollywood film.”

Precisely, many painters have said to what extent that “light of Hollywood” has influenced their works, and not only because of the Technicolor spectrum, but also due to the Cinemascope format. As you say, David Reed uses the panoramic format to produce “movement” effects, and he admits the importance that Western films have had as well as the landscapes from Monument Valley –so linked in their sublime character to the spaces of the Abstract Expressionism. The same is true in the opposite direction, and I remember how one day, when studying about Barnett Newman, his influence was present in any of the contemporary films of Antonioni.

I have digressed from the ‘aluminium paintings’, in fact, I remember now how the first one emerged in one of the routine technical tests: I gave the colour and after a palette knife stroke… it was there! The image appeared almost like a photographic process. It was hung in the studio for several months and it produced contradictory reactions and thoughts within me –that is what usually happens with the first paintings of any series-. It seemed to me a good painting, even ‘attractive’, but I did not know wether there was something else to it than just ‘a beautiful effect’ or wether from anoter perspective it was perhaps too ‘Richter’. Finally I hung it on the exhibition at Lalín, on a wall for which I had not found any solution.

Then, I clearly realized it was matching in spite of the formal differences regarding other works, and they complemented each other. I no longer felt strange about it. I remember that Lamazares came to me and said that he had no doubts that it was the best painting in the

exhibition. The point is that exhibitions are completely necessary to see how works of art work, to put an order to one’s speech and to keep on learning. From there on I used them as “counterpoints” to Luzpincolour. They were like the syntactic punctuation signs in a text. For this I paid much attention to Helmut Dorner and the importance he gives to space among paintings, almost like a metaphor of the distance between the painter and the spectator.

DB: I think Helmut Dorner not only gathers this spatial strategy of distances but he has shared at many moments, the loss of control over the painting, his preference for unintentional alteration of it and chance.

AN: In fact ‘the aluminium paintings’ means a return to some kind of ‘direct painting’, to chance, to the physical relationship with painting... a true balsam in opposition to the mechanistic process of Luzpincolour. In fact, sometimes I see them as a representation of the body impulse at the moment when I was painting them... and of course they have nothing to do with ‘expressionism’, because here there are no gestures, but ‘surface tracking’.

With regard to his ‘richterianism’, I am not going to deny that he has been one of the painters who has had one of the biggest impacts on me, in fact, I still remember a warm Summer afternoon when I saw his retrospective of MNCARS, I was a naive student and that exhibition meant a crucial point, a dizzy journey along the history of painting, its ‘motifs’, and all the variety of techniques that his work involves... Paraphrasing his famous conversation with Buchloh, I also say that with the aluminium I wanted to reach another place, to produce something else... I do not know if I have succeeded.

CARLOS CARVALHO ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA Rua Joly Braga Santos, Lte. F - r/c + (351) 217 261 831 + (351) 217 210 874 carloscarvalho-ac@carloscarvalho-ac.com http://www.carloscarvalho-ac.com Seg a Sex das 10h às 19h30 / Sáb das 12h às 19h30 From Mon to Fri: 10am to 7:30pm / Sat: 12:00 to 7:30pm Artistas Artists Ricardo Angélico | José Bechara | Isidro Blasco | Daniel Blaufuks Catarina Campino | Mónica Capucho | Isabel Brison | Carla Cabanas Manuel Caeiro | Alexandra do Carmo | Paulo Catrica | Sandra Cinto Roland Fischer | Javier Núñez Gasco | Susana Gaudêncio | Catarina Leitão Álvaro Negro | Luís Nobre | Ana Luísa Ribeiro | Richard Schur José Lourenço | José Batista Marques | Antía Moure | Noé Sendas Eurico Lino do Vale | Manuel Vilariño