«Júlio Pomar e Rui Chafes: Desenhar» by Sistema Solar - Documenta

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:02 Page 2

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:02 Page 3

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:02 Page 4

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:02 Page 5

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:02 Page 6

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:02 Page 7

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:02 Page 8

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:02 Page 9

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:02 Page 10

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:02 Page 11

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 12

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 13

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 14

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 15

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 16

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 17

titulo

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 18

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 19

titulo

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 20

rui chafes, As tuas mãos | Your hands (pp. 2-15) júlio pomar, Étreinte [Abraço] | Étreinte [Embrace] (pp. 16-29)

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 21

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 22

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 23

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 24

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 25

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 26

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 27

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 28

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 29

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 30

CONSELHO DE ADMINISTRAÇÃO DA EGEAC

ATELIER-MUSEU JÚLIO POMAR

EXPOSIÇÃO

Joana Gomes Cardoso Lucinda Lopes Manuel Veiga

directora | curadora Sara Antónia Matos

curadoria Sara Antónia Matos

adjunta de direcção Graça Rodrigues

artistas Júlio Pomar Rui Chafes

conservação e produção Sara Antónia Matos Graça Rodrigues Pedro Faro comunicação Graça Rodrigues investigação Sara Antónia Matos Pedro Faro coordenação editorial Sara Antónia Matos serviço educativo Teresa Santos apoio ao serviço educativo Teresa Cardoso serviços administrativos Isabel Marques Teresa Cardoso apoio / parceria

Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar | EGEAC Rua do Vale, 7 1200-472 Lisboa Portugal Tel + 351 215 880 793

montagem João Nora Laurindo Marta Nelson Melo design gráfico Pedro Falcão folha de sala Ana Gonçalves agradecimentos Pipa João Silvério Tereza Marta

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 31

Júlio Pomar Rui Chafes

desenhar textos

Sara Antónia Matos João Barrento Maria João Mayer Branco

D O C U M E N TA CADERNOS DO ATELIER-MUSEU JÚLIO POMAR

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:47 Page 32

CATÁLOGO

concepção Manuel Rosa Sara Antónia Matos textos Sara Antónia Matos João Barrento Maria João Mayer Branco design gráfico Manuel Rosa fotografia António Jorge Silva Luísa Ferreira (pp. 68-77) revisão Cristina Guerra tradução Lucy Phillips (Kennis Translations) imagens © Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar textos © autores fotografias © António Jorge Silva / AMJP (2015) © Luísa Ferreira / AMJP (2013) ISBN 978-989-8618-98-6

tiragem: 1000 exemplares depósito legal: 403250/15 impressão e acabamento Gráfica Maiadouro SA Rua Padre Luís Campos, 586 e 686, Vermoim 4471-909 Maia

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 33

a partilha do impartilhável Sara Antónia Matos Curadora da exposição | Directora do Atelier-Museu

«Júlio Pomar e Rui Chafes: Desenhar» dá início a um programa de exposições do Atelier-Museu que procura cruzar a obra de Júlio Pomar com a de outros artistas, de modo a estabelecer novas relações entre a obra do pintor e a contemporaneidade. A exposição foi pensada, desde a sua génese, como uma intervenção específica no espaço do Atelier-Museu, onde Júlio Pomar e Rui Chafes desenham recorrendo às qualidades dos traços negros, esboçados ora em linhas de carvão e grafite ora em linhas de ferro tridimensionais, assim investindo sobre uma ideia particular de «desenho» que toma corpo no espaço. Sendo a exposição pensada como um desenho que ocupa todo o Atelier-Museu, transformando-se o espaço do museu no suporte dessa disciplina, isso envolve questões disciplinares, nomeadamente a de pensar o desenho no campo da espacialidade, e a permeabilidade da obra pelo espectador, que nela penetra ao entrar no espaço. Um projecto desta natureza, em que a intervenção artística adopta a espacialidade do museu como matéria de trabalho e em que a obra passa a coincidir em parte com a sua forma de disposição, revela-se uma oportunidade de teste e reinvenção também para os princípios de trabalho curatoriais. Disse noutra ocasião1 que a curadoria, enquanto prática de especificidades próprias, só se efectiva quando faz exercício de todas as instâncias inerentes ao processo de formulação de uma exposição, ou seja, quando o processo é negociado. Essa negociação envolve um pacto apresentação

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 34

entre o curador e o artista, que é feito de expectativas mas também de raptos, labirintos e enredos, sem os quais cada novo projecto não se apresenta como um desafio, com potencial para se afirmar enquanto ensaio. Deve então dizer-se que em «Júlio Pomar e Rui Chafes: Desenhar» os processos de trabalho assumiram novos modelos, celebrando um pacto que é tanto mais frutífero quanto põe em prática um exercício crítico, construído em comum por curadores e artistas, que podem inclusive arriscar trocar de posições abrindo campo para novas formas de fazer e de construir um discurso. Como se a curadoria desse azo a uma dança em que, por momentos, alternadamente, um dos pares se deixa conduzir pelo outro e se entrega de olhos fechados ao movimento. Nesta exposição, esse movimento estabeleceu-se entre mim, na função de curadora, e o artista Rui Chafes, e envolveu não só a escolha das obras, tarefa protocolarmente alocada ao curador, como a montagem das obras no espaço, que, neste caso, foi inteiramente concebida pelo escultor. O artista determinou a disposição das obras, as relações de vizinhança entre elas, a cor das paredes, a intensidade e a temperatura da luz que sobre elas incide, estendendo o seu olhar de artista para o campo de acção que usualmente (mas sem regra vinculativa) está a cargo do curador. A concepção da montagem por parte do artista constituiu desse modo um enriquecimento ímpar para o curador, permitindo-lhe ter uma nova compreensão do espaço, ver as obras dos artistas a partir do ponto de vista do criador, acompanhar a montagem a gerar-se no espaço, o fundo a tomar forma, as composições a emergirem sobre os suportes, as massas a perderem o peso, o museu a transformar-se numa casa habitada. Mas talvez mais que tudo isto: os modelos curatoriais aplicados na exposição autorizaram presenciar o movimento que permite tornar o impartilhável partilhável. Aquilo que o escultor se dispôs a fazer ao assumir e liderar a montagem da exposição foi tornar possível uma impossibilidade, partilhar com os pro34

sara antónia matos

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 35

fissionais do museu aquilo que não se pode partilhar: o ver a obra a acontecer, não só a dele como também as forças que envolvem e ligam a sua obra com a de Júlio Pomar. Ver a exposição a gerar-se e transferir para ela (tornando isso visível para o público) as forças do movimento criador. Materializar este movimento que não se deixa capturar; trata-se na verdade de trabalhar um oxímoro em que a arte radica e que, como diz Júlio Pomar, une indissoluvelmente as forças de vida e de morte, a criação e a destruição, a materialidade e a transcendência, o sítio onde «descer» para chegar ao outro talvez signifique «subir». Talvez sejam estes, de facto, a energia e o movimento que estão na base da exposição que à entrada nos parece envolver e levantar num movimento ascendente para depois nos fulminar os sentidos sem razoabilidade. À escolha das obras não foi alheia a dimensão erótica que, embora com nuances diferentes, atravessa a obra dos dois autores, e que tem feito parte do meu campo de investigação enquanto curadora. Apesar de intrinsecamente ligada à arte pela natureza sensível desta, a dimensão de erotismo tem sido uma figura frequentemente negligenciada e até ausente dos discursos estéticos e das abordagens das obras. Ligados ao corpo e particularmente às profundezas mais viscerais, o desejo e o erotismo perturbam a ordem do discurso, encerram uma propensão para o enigma, para o hermetismo, para o secreto, em suma, para a não-comunicação. No entanto, parece ser dessa impossibilidade, da partilha do impartilhável, que esta exposição procura falar, sem todavia violar a sua condição de indizível. Como é isso possível? Recorramos a Notas sobre a Melodia das Coisas, escrito em 1898 por Rainer Marie Rilke. O autor sugere que para a arte se realizar plenamente, se cumprir plenamente, «tem de actuar onde todos são Um»2. Seria aí, e apenas por essa via, que se tornaria partilhável, mas no seu silêncio. Só essa forma de comunicar, muda, permitiria a fidelidade mais extrema. Fidelidade a quê? À capacidade da linguagem, da apresentação

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 36

expressão, do gesto, do corpo, para preservar o segredo contra a propensão para o trair. Sobre a partilha do impartilhável, inerente à arte: raiar o intraduzível, raiando primeiro o indizível, o inominável, no seio da sua própria língua — a do corpo e do fazer com os materiais (artísticos). Mexer em todos os sentidos, fulminá-los de lés a lés, sem nos apercebermos como nem porquê. Tal como na arte, as nossas melhores relações, no amor e na amizade, não conservam essa qualidade de segredo e discrição que preserva «a distância na proximidade»? Se não tivéssemos cercado as inquietantes regiões do indizível, teríamos o sentido secreto do impartilhável?

* O Atelier-Museu agradece a Júlio Pomar e à sua Fundação a enorme confiança que depositam nos profissionais do museu; a Rui Chafes pela generosidade, o rigor e a disponibilidade incansável com que se dedicou a esta exposição fazendo dela um projecto específico e irrepetível do Atelier-Museu; a João Nora, Laurindo Marta e Nelson Melo que acompanharam e auxiliaram o escultor na montagem; a João Barrento e Maria João Mayer Branco, que aceitaram contribuir com os seus ensaios para uma leitura e abordagem, poética e filosófica, não só das obras dos autores como da exposição como um todo; e a Manuel Rosa e à Documenta, parceira imprescindível das Edições do Atelier-Museu, com quem nos honra muito desenvolver o projecto editorial. _____________

1 2

«Pacto e curadoria», in Rui Chafes, Sob a Pele… Conversas com Sara Antónia Matos, Cadernos do Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar / Sistema Solar (Documenta), Lisboa: 2015. Rainer Marie Rilke, Notas sobre a Melodia das Coisas, Editora Licorne, 3.ª edição, 2015. sara antónia matos

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:03 Page 37

júlio pomar, Estudo [Sem título] | Study [Untitled ]

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:04 Page 49

eros eólico João Barrento 1. Tudo começou com a ideia de colocar este encontro entre Júlio Pomar e Rui Chafes sob o duplo signo de Eros e Éolos, do Desejo e do Sopro. Na capa do caderno de notas figura ainda um primeiro título, uma simples hipótese de orientação que acabaria por se tornar definitiva: «Eros eólico». Com Eros tudo parecia desde logo mais claro. Eros e arte desde sempre se encontraram, a Ars Amatoria de Ovídio dá-os como irmãos gémeos, água da mesma fonte. Eros é uma arte, não mero sentimento subjectivo ou ímpeto passional; e a arte é sempre atravessada por uma pulsão erótica, o que quer dizer: para nascer e ser actuante tem de ser, nela mesma, objecto de desejo e lugar de beleza — ambos (como o cerne da própria obra) evanescentes, transitórios, em transe (insustentável, sempre mutante) e em trânsito para a morte. A obra, que nasce da consciência desta sua transitoriedade (ou talvez da secreta intenção de uma «perenidade mortal»), está aí e oferece-se à contemplação. Intrinsecamente, é um corpo — de formas, de espaço e tempo, de seivas e sopros, instável, captação móvel de um instante, caminho incerto e tacteante de morte a morte. É assim que vejo as «Figueiras» e os nus de Pomar, é assim o modo leve de ser do ferro aéreo de Rui Chafes. Sobre Éolo, o deus dos ventos, a tradição não diz muito. Homero (Odisseia, X) apresenta a sua ilha, Eólia, como «ilha flutuante» de onde eros eólico

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:04 Page 50

sopram ventos que ou salvam ou afundam. Mais um curioso símile para a obra de arte e as suas derivas, mormente as desta exposição, com o seu traço e o seu gesto particularmente dinâmicos e essencialmente infixos. Mas o título, claro e incisivo, encontrado para a exposição — simplesmente «Desenhar» — levou-me a inflectir nesse sentido e a olhar para as obras que podemos ver no Atelier-Museu do ponto de vista mais estrito do «desenho», aceitando todo o espectro de ambiguidade, de plurivalências e de tensões abertas que marcam a ideia, a prática e a história desta forma de expressão desde as suas origens nas cavernas, no momento da invenção dos alfabetos ou naquele outro em que, segundo a lenda, a filha do oleiro de Sícion recortou na parede a sombra do amante — marca de uma presença-ausência que não deixou, até hoje, de ser um traço constitutivo essencial dessa prática artística da evanescência. Desde sempre, o desenho traça as linhas do desejo no vento, lança sementes, ensaia rotas sem buscar sentidos, projecta horizontes que não se preocupa em alcançar. É a mais alta expressão de uma certa perfeição humana do fracasso (ou vice-versa) e dos seus eternos atalhos. Os poetas também sabem disso. T.S. Eliot, falando do material das palavras (não tão diferente assim do do desenho), escreve num dos seus Quatro Quartetos: In my beginning is my end (…) So here I am (…) Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure… Sob o signo do desenho, e para lá de quaisquer limites ou limitações de um género artístico que ele afinal nunca foi, acontece então «o encontro inesperado do diverso» — como diria Maria Gabriela Llansol — de dois iguais e diferentes, de duas formas de «desenho» que se cruzam e olham no ambiente certo, no atelier, o lugar mutante 50

joão barrento

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:04 Page 51

do fazer, da criação em processo. Pomar, esculpindo em traço inquieto o vento que circula pelas figueiras ou o fogo que anima os corpos, em quase-esboços meramente alusivos, desafios à imaginação erótica; Chafes levando ao extremo a equação peso-leveza, desenhando no espaço, gerando esculturas aéreas, em desenhos tridimensionais e matéricos (As tuas mãos), ou recortando no azul cinza de uma parede dezassete peças aparentemente iguais e todas diferentes (Penugem), ritmando «perfis de mulher» que, em perspectiva lateral, me sugeriram caracteres hebraicos — aqueles que, como os hieróglifos, nas suas origens mais claramente derivam de formas vivas ou plásticas (o vav é o gancho, o aleph é o touro, os yod são como que os membros de deus/Yahveh…). Nos perfis de Rui Chafes vejo uma sequência irregular de caracteres vivos: zain-vav-dalet-gimel-nun-khaf-reish…

Uma linguagem secreta? A fala de Eva finalmente liberta do tédio do Paraíso? A «Penugem» leve da linha da pele feminina vibrando com o sopro que vem da parede que com esta dialoga, a das folhaseros eólico

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:04 Page 52

-de-vento das figueiras de Júlio Pomar? Julguei ouvir, na serena agitação deste diálogo, o silêncio loquaz e absoluto do aleph, o ponto de convergência e não-anulação do Nada e do Todo, do Vazio e do Pleno, que ecoa também no conhecido conto de Borges… Llansol, que desenha muito, sem pretensões, nos seus cadernos de escrita, e aproxima as duas formas de expressão, fala, a propósito dos seus desenhos (ingénuos, «expressionistas», gestuais, construtivistas…), de dois tipos de vibração: a do sopro que por eles passa, e a de um «pensamento em harmonia». Também aqui descubro essa dupla vibração: em Pomar, o que conduz a mão parece ser mais uma intuição das linhas a captar, de forças em acção, mais do que formas; em Chafes, apesar da leveza relativa destas peças, há sempre mais o peso de uma ideia, de algo mais lentamente visionado, concebido, executado no trabalho da mão oficinal. Aqui, na alma do ferro, uma gestação; ali, no impulso imponderável e repetido do lápis, uma erupção. Aqui, mais pensamento, ali, mais vento. E formas diversas do mesmo sopro de Eros atravessando as obras de ambos, um desenhando no espaço, o outro esculpindo, construindo movimento no plano. Mas depois, naturalmente, há o próprio de cada um. Também disso é preciso dar conta.

2. Pomar: O sopro do Há O filósofo Emmanuel Levinas define o Há (il y a) como um sussuro do mundo (um «brumor», dirá Llansol), «algo que se parece com aquilo que se ouve ao aproximarmos do ouvido uma concha vazia, como se o vazio estivesse cheio» (Levinas). A experiência do Há leva à constatação de que o que parece ser uma ausência se converte numa presença, como uma atmosfera densa, mas leve e distante. 52

joão barrento

001-063_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:04 Page 53

* Na série do Caderno de figueiras Júlio Pomar busca, ao que me parece, dar a ouvir esse brumor do mundo, e não tanto «representar o irrepresentável». Pomar confirma: «Olhar um desenho é pôr o olhar à escuta das sonoridades desse traço, do que ele diz, do que sugere, do que ele cala» (Temas e Variações. Parte escrita III, 218).

* De facto, não se trata aí de representar. Trata-se de trazer à linha (do desenho) o que, entre as folhas da figueira, é da ordem dos elementos: o vento e o movimento que produz. O resto, se resto há, fica com a figueira, não é o que os olhos e o lápis nela buscam. O desígnio do olhar é antes a outra parte da paisagem, aquela de que a obra «dá testemunho», como da sua escrita diz ainda Llansol, num inédito de 1988: «A viagem começa no corpo quando este desliza do real para um outro real-não-existente. Não desliza para a fantasia: o nosso olhar vê uma parte da paisagem, e da outra dá testemunho.» Esse testemunho é o desenho (a escultura-desenho) que temos à nossa frente.

* Júlio Pomar confirma: «Não invento nada e não confio na imaginação» (O Artista Fala, 83). O olhar apenas vê, sobrevê, e corre o risco — porque de um gesto arriscado se trata — de transformar o que «não aparece» em riscos, traços, signos. Acontece (como na relação entre a obra e o seu título em Rui Chafes), não uma representação do objecto, mas uma alusão à sua «sombra». A sombra da figueira é o sopro, a sombra dos corpos é o desejo. Não estamos no plano do empírico e de uma sua ontologia, mas no de uma metafísica da imanência. O que aqui fala é uma espécie de terceiro excluído — nem o eu nem o objecto —, que se manifesta como presença de uma ausência determinante. eros eólico

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 112

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 113

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 114

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 115

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 116

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 117

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 118

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 119

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 120

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 121

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 122

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 123

D E - S I D E R AT I O

Maria João Mayer Branco e procuramos, se não as trevas, pelo menos uma densa penumbra e um lugar menos exposto que a luz Ovídio, A Arte de Amar

A exposição começa com uma separação: fecharam-se as janelas, fica de fora a luz diurna e o seu ritmo ordenador. Quem entra, sai do tempo e do espaço comuns, onde prosseguem, irredutíveis, os trabalhos e os dias. Se é verdade que a arte «somente surge com a cidade», assumiu-se aqui que ela «não pertence à cidade»1. O Atelier-Museu é público, mas reconfigurou-se como um lugar de recolhimento, de acolhimento. Imaginou-se como uma câmara, «uma pequena câmara de uma villa na sombra»2, uma parte de um espaço maior, uma parte que se colocou à parte. Estamos antes da arquitectura. Antes da casa, antes do museu, como que ao lado do mundo. Em virtude do gesto separador, mal reconhecemos este lugar. Suprimidas as aberturas e a concentração luminosa numa espécie de grande clareira central, não sobram vestígios do que resplende e quase suspende a divisão entre o fora e o dentro, integrando o edifício «discretamente na malha arquitectónica do bairro»3. Até aqui, quase não havia descontinuidade, estranheza, e, portanto, efectiva passagem. Até aqui, estávamos, por assim dizer, em casa. Agora avançamos, com hesitação, para o interior de uma espécie de reserva da vida, onde a nossa presença é infinitamente ambígua. Somos visitantes, quer dizer, ao mesmo tempo bem-vindos e estranhos. A iluminação, constante e uniforme, indiferente ao pulsar DE - SIDERATIO

123

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 124

do quotidiano, exprime o anseio de uma luz humana, mas soberana. É um anúncio e um aviso: algo foi interrompido, algo que sabíamos ou julgávamos saber deve ser suspenso. Nada aqui é «natural». A luz é uma mentira; a montagem, um artifício; a relação entre as obras expostas, uma aposta sem garantias. Instaurou-se uma hierarquia espacial, uma verticalidade, e as divisões ligam-se por princípios alheios à geometria: baixo e cima, queda e voo, poço e mezzanine, vida e morte, começo e fim. Dois planos separados, que não cessam, porém, de comunicar. Em baixo, não podemos ver que sonho se eleva desse plano inferior; uma vez em cima, é impossível ignorar o fundo em que a todo o momento podemos voltar a cair. O gesto separador é, num primeiro momento, um gesto de negação e limitação: da vida colectiva, do mundo partilhado, do ritmo invencível da natureza. Ele interrompe artificialmente o curso habitual das coisas, desenha um limite, que é a condição de haver arte. Os limites afastam e protegem, atenuam o que, sem eles, é violento ou potencialmente destruidor. Por exemplo, amar e morrer. A ordem da cidade, também chamada «o mundo do trabalho», põe «regras às forças sexuais» e «limita as desordens que anunciam o poder da morte (…) opondo-nos ao tumulto das paixões que se liberta da animalidade sem freio.»4 Este mundo ordenado, regulado, onde é possível a vida humana — «a nossa vida, um mundo»5 —, nasceu, também ele, com um «não», um «não» ao movimento da natureza, à violência, ao excesso que ela implica. O trabalho, que é a condição do nascimento da arte, e com o qual se pode dizer que o homem surge, introduz uma pausa na insuprimível instabilidade natural, uma descontinuidade, um intervalo mais ou menos duradouro na incessante sequência de geração e destruição em que a natureza consiste. O «nosso» mundo é um mundo de limites, onde o humano se abriga de um elemento excessivo. O qual, no entanto, irremediavelmente o constitui. 124

maria joão mayer branco

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 125

Os limites regulam, organizam, ordenam, mas são uma «pausa», «não imobilidade última»6. Quer dizer, o recuo que impõem em relação ao excessivo admite, ele mesmo, interrupções, transgressões, perturbações. Na pausa, a realidade aparece ferida de insuficiência, é sentida como «uma tristeza»7, e o excesso apresenta-se como o inesperado ou o inesperável, como «aquilo que é mais do que é»8. Nas obras de arte ele é revivido, e é nesse sentido que elas transgridem, negam ou se separam do mundo, criando, como nesta exposição, «um espaço de silêncio» que torna possível «a desaceleração, a retracção, a contracção»9. A arte transgride o mundo do trabalho, separa-se dele, no sentido em que excede a estabilidade, a previsibilidade, a calculabilidade. Tal transgressão, porém, a negação da «fastidiosa regularidade da ordem humana»10, não destrói o que transgride. A arte pressupõe o mundo que interrompe, do qual se separa e contra o qual protesta, mas sem o qual não poderia ser: o mundo trivial dos «objectos manejáveis e acessíveis sem limitação»11. Pode dizer-se que é disso que se trata aqui, de um gesto que é um protesto, discreto e revelador da «exigência de um mundo mais profundo, mais rico e prodigioso»12. Esta exposição, improvável e, em vários sentidos, inaugural, é sobre a arte, na medida em que a arte responde a um desejo de prodígio. As obras expostas são, por isso, «objectos fascinantes»13, diante dos quais experimentamos imediatamente os nossos limites (de compreensão, de acesso, de conhecimento). Eles repetem o momento em que a arte nasce, quer dizer, o momento de transgressão e subversão, no qual toda a arte consiste e com o qual «a comunicação dos espíritos começa»14.

DE - SIDERATIO

125

064-140_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:14 Page 126

não haverá paz para aquele que ama Herberto Helder (1930-2015)

Os artistas aqui representados, um pintor e um escultor, são ambos portugueses e pertencem a gerações diferentes. As suas obras constituem dois universos com linguagens e linhagens distintas, que agora consentiram em articular-se, sob a designação geral «Desenhar». Ambos escrevem sobre o seu trabalho e se ocupam do que a arte pode ainda ser, das «relações entre o regrado e o desregrado», do «sentimento de que o dado como adquirido pode tornar-se outra coisa»15. Numa «sociedade sem alegria», procuram «deslocar o espectador para um ponto onde uma nova construção da realidade pode acontecer»16. Esta exposição é isso e sobre isso. Contra todas as expectativas em contrário, ela convida-nos a pensar que «um novo percurso aberto e fulminante continua a ser possível como resposta a qualquer solicitação súbita, vinda do exterior e capaz de deitar abaixo a ordem esperada.»17 A exposição apresenta «desenhos» de Júlio Pomar e de Rui Chafes, e a sua disposição no interior do museu parece esclarecer, se não o «tema», pelo menos o sentido que propomos dar-lhes. O sentido, ou seja, um conjunto de interrogações, que começa com o vislumbre da peça As tuas mãos (1998-2013). Assim que entra, o visitante é surpreendido, quase ameaçado, por um conjunto de formas negras colocadas à sua altura, e pela incerteza acerca do que parece ser o seu movimento. Não sabemos se podemos andar entre estas peças, se elas voam ou nadam, se vão cair ou sustentam, incrivelmente, o espaço que ocuparam. Depois do espanto inicial, compreendemos que as esculturas flutuantes, ondulantes, curvilíneas, estão suspensas por cabos de aço, seguras pela tensão de longas linhas rectas metálicas. A sua distribuição no espaço evoca uma dança, um bailado de formas orgânicas que pairam, delicadamente, no ar, unindo-se em pares ou em 126

maria joão mayer branco

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:36 Page 152

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:36 Page 153

lista de obras | list of works

p. 37 Júlio Pomar Estudo [Sem título] | Study [Untitled], sem data | undated Lápis sobre papel timbrado | Pencil on letterhead paper 26,5 × 20,6 cm pp. 67-77 Júlio Pomar Sem título [Desenhos do caderno de figueiras], sem data (década de 1960) | Untitled [Drawings from fig tree notebook], undated (1960s) Tinta permanente | Permanent ink 20 × 25,5 cm pp. 101-105 Júlio Pomar Estudos [Mãos] | Studies [Hands], 1953 Caneta sobre papel | Pen on paper 22 × 35 cm pp. 141-151 Júlio Pomar Estudos de nu [Caderno de estudos de nu], sem data | Nude studies [Notebook with studies for nude], undated Marcador e tinta-da-china sobre papel | Marker and Indian ink on paper 39,5 × 27 cm e | and 27 × 39,5 cm

lista de obras | imagens

153

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 28/12/15 23:36 Page 154

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 155

TRANSLATIONS

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 156

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 157

sharing the unshareable Sara Antónia Matos Exhibition curator | Director of Atelier-Museu

‘Júlio Pomar and Rui Chafes: Drawing’ inaugurates a programme of exhibitions at the Atelier-Museu that aims to connect Júlio Pomar’s work with the work of other artists and establish new linkages between the painter’s work and contemporaneity. As such, this exhibition was conceived from the very beginning as a specific intervention in the Atelier-Museu’s space, where Júlio Pomar and Rui Chafes’s drawings scrutinise a particular idea of ‘drawing’ that materialises in the space through the qualities of the black outlines, either sketched in charcoal and graphite or as three dimensional iron lines. The fact that the exhibition is conceived as a drawing that occupies the entire Atelier-Museu, transforming the museum space into a support for this discipline, entails disciplinary questions, in particular thinking of the drawing in terms of spatiality and the permeability of the work on the part of the spectator, who penetrates it upon entering the space. A project of this nature, in which artistic intervention adopts the spatiality of the museum as a working material in which the work itself comes to partly merge with its disposition, also provides an opportunity for experimentation and reinvention in terms of the principles of curatorial work. I said on another occasion1 that curating, as a practice with its own particularities, is only effective when it takes into account all the possibilities that exist in the process of formulating an exhibition, i.e. when the process is negotiated. This negotiation involves a pact between the curator and the artist that involves expectations, but also obstacles and moments of ecstasy and intrigue, without which each new project would not be a challenge with the potential for providing a test. It should be said then that in ‘Júlio Pomar presentation

157

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 158

and Rui Chafes: Drawing’ the work processes involved adopted new paradigms, celebrating a pact that becomes all the more fruitful as it embarks on a critical exercise, constructed jointly by the curator and the artist alike, who may even risk switching roles, thereby opening up new ways of doing and of constructing discourse. As if curating were giving rise to a dance in which, alternately and momentarily, one of the partners follows the other’s lead, closing their eyes and surrendering themselves to the movement. In this exhibition, that movement took hold of me, the curator, and Rui Chafes, the artist, and led not only to the choice of the works, traditionally the domain of the curator, but also to the assembly of the works within the space which, in this case, was conceived entirely by the sculptor himself. The artist decided on the arrangement of the pieces, the proximity between them, the colour of the walls, the intensity and temperature of the light, thereby extending his artist’s eye to an area usually (though there are no binding rules) reserved for the curator. The fact that the artist planned the layout was, therefore, a uniquely enriching experience for the curator, allowing a new comprehension of the space and the opportunity to see the artists’ works from the perspective of the creator and witness the assembly process unfolding within the space, the background taking shape, the compositions rising up onto the supports, the masses becoming weightless, the museum transforming into an inhabited house. Perhaps more than all this: the curatorial models applied in the exhibition allow the movement that makes the unshareable shareable to be experienced. By taking the lead in assembling the exhibition, the artist made the impossible possible, sharing with museum staff that which cannot be shared: seeing the work come to fruition, and not merely his work but also the innate forces that connect his with that of Júlio Pomar. Seeing the exhibition take form and bestowing it with the forces of creative movement, thereby rendering this visible to the public. Materialising this movement that cannot be captured is, in truth, working with an oxymoron in which art is rooted and which, as Júlio Pomar says, inextricably links the forces of life and death, creation and de158

sara antónia matos

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 159

struction, materiality and transcendence, a place where ‘descending’ to arrive at the other perhaps means ‘ascending’. Perhaps this is, in fact, the energy and movement that forms the basis of the exhibition, which at the entrance appears to envelop us and hoist us into an upward motion to then strike our senses without moderation. The choice of works did not ignore the erotic dimension, which, although with different nuances, permeates the work of both artists, and which has formed part of my field of research as a curator. Although intrinsically linked with art due to its sensitive nature, the erotic dimension has been frequently overlooked and even absent from aesthetic discourse and insights into works. Connected with the body and particularly the more visceral depths, desire and eroticism disrupt the order of discourse and are grounded in a predisposition towards the enigmatic, the introspective, the secretive, in short, the non-communication. However, it appears to be from this impossibility of sharing the unshareable that the exhibition manages to speak, without violating its unspeakable status. How is this possible? Let us make reference to Notes on the Melody of Things, written in 1898 by Rainer Marie Rilke. It suggests that for art to fully fulfil itself, to fully satisfy itself, ‘it has to appear where everybody is — a someone’.2 There and there only would it become shareable, albeit in silence. Only that means of communication, mute, would allow the utmost loyalty. Loyalty to what? The ability of language, expression, gesture, the body, to keep a secret when there is such tendency to betray it. The sharing of the unshareable, inherent in art: shedding light on the untranslatable, broaching the unspeakable and the unmentionable, and doing so using its own language — that of the body and of creating with (artistic) materials. Touching every sense, striking from top to bottom, without us realising how or why. As in art, do not our best relationships, in love and friendship, preserve that secret and discreet quality that maintains ‘distance in proximity’? presentation

159

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 160

If we had not approached the disquieting realm of the unspeakable, would we have the secret sense of the unshareable? * The Atelier-Museu would like to thank Júlio Pomar and his foundation for the huge amount of confidence shown in the museum staff; Rui Chafes for the generosity, rigour, and tireless availability with which he approached this exhibition, making it a unique and unrepeatable project for the Atelier-Museu; João Nora, Laurindo Marta and Nelson Melo who accompanied and assisted the sculptor during the assembly process; João Barrento and Maria João Mayer Branco, who agreed to contribute, with their essays, to a poetic and philosophical interpretation of and perspective on both the artists’ works and the exhibition as a whole; and Manuel Rosa and Documenta, an essential partner in Atelier-Museu publications, honouring us by undertaking the publishing project.

_____________ 1

160

‘Pacto e curadoria’, in Rui Chafes, Sob a Pele… Conversas com Sara Antónia Matos, Cadernos do Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar/Sistema Solar (Documenta), Lisbon: 2015. Rainer Marie Rilke, ‘Notes on the Melody of Things’ in The Inner Sky: poems, notes, dreams by Rainer Maria Rilke, selected and translated by Damion Searls, Publisher: David R. Goldine, Boston 2010, p. 47.

sara antónia matos

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 161

a eolia n eros João Barrento 1. It all began with the idea of setting out this encounter between Júlio Pomar and Rui Chafes under the double sign of Eros and Aeolus, of Desire and Breath. An initial title can still be seen on the notebook, a simple hypothetical direction that became definitive: ‘Aeolian Eros’. With Eros, everything seemed clearer from the outset. Eros and art have always encountered each other; Ovid’s Ars Amatoria presents them as twins, flowing from the same source. Eros is an art, not merely a subjective feeling or passionate impulse; and art is always suffused by an erotic drive. What this means is that: for art to emerge and to act it must be, in itself, an object of desire and a place of beauty — both of them (like the core of the work itself ) evanescent, transient, in a trance (unsustainable, always changing) and in transit to death. The work, which is born of an awareness of its transient nature (or perhaps of the secret desire for a ‘mortal perpetuity’), is there and it offers itself up to our gaze. Intrinsically, it is a body — of forms, of space and time, of sap and breath, unstable, the moving plucking of a moment, an uncertain and probing path from death to death. This is how I see Pomar’s ‘Fig trees’ and nudes, and it is also the light touch of Rui Chafes’s aerial steel. Tradition tells us little about Aeolus, god of the winds. Homer (The Odyssey, X) depicts his island, Aeolia, as a ‘floating island’, the source of winds that either save or cause shipwrecks. Another interesting simile for the work of art and its drifts, one that is particularly suited to those in this exhibition, whose traces and gestures are especially dynamic and essentially unfixed. aeolian eros

161

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 162

The incisive and clear title, however, that was found for this exhibition — simply ‘Drawing’ — led me to turn in this direction and to look at the works that can be seen in the Studio-Museum from the stricter perspective of ‘drawing’, accepting the full range of ambiguity, versatility and open tensions that characterise the idea, practice and history of this form of expression from its origins in caves, at that moment when alphabets were invented, or at that other moment when, legend has it, the daughter of the potter of Sicyon drew the silhouette of her lover in outline on the wall — the mark of a presence/absence that remains, to this day, an essential and formative trait of this artistic practice of evanescence. Drawing has always traced the lines of desire in the wind, it scatters seeds, tries out paths without looking for directions, projects horizons that it is unconcerned with reaching. It is the highest expression of a certain human perfection of failure (or vice versa) and of its eternal paths. This is something that poets also understand. T.S. Eliot, speaking about the matter of words (not so different from that of drawing), wrote in one of his Four Quartets: In my beginning is my end (…) So here I am (…) Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure… Under the sign of drawing, and transcending any limits or limitations of an artistic genre that, ultimately, it never was, what happens then is the ‘unexpected encounter with difference’ — as Maria Gabriela Llansol would put it — of two things that are the same but different, of two forms of ‘drawing’ that, in the right surroundings, in the studio, the mutable place of doing, of creation in process, encounter and contemplate each other. Pomar, restlessly sculpting the lines of the wind that circulates between the fig trees, or the fire that animates bodies, in semi-sketches that are merely allusive, challenges to the erotic imagination; Chafes taking the weight/light equation to an extreme, drawing in space, creating aerial sculptures, threedimensional and material drawings (As tuas mãos | Your hands), or outlining 162

joão barrento

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 163

on the grey-blue of a wall 17 works that are apparently the same and each one different (Penugem | Down), rhythmically tracing ‘outlines of women’ that, from the side, put me in mind of Hebrew characters — which, like hieroglyphics, have origins derived more clearly from living or plastic forms (the vav is the hook, the aleph is the bull, the yod are like the limbs of God/Yahveh…). In Rui Chafes’s outlines, I see an irregular sequence of living characters: zain-vav-dalet-gimel-nun-khaf-reish…

A secret language? The words of Eve finally freed from the tedium of Paradise? The light ‘Down’ of the line of female skin vibrating with the breath that comes from the wall with which it enters in dialogue, that of the rustling leaves of Júlio Pomar’s fig trees? I seemed to hear, in the serene agitation of this dialogue, the eloquent and total silence of the aleph, the point of convergence and non-annihilation of Nothing and Everything, of the Void and Plenitude, which also resonates through Borges’ famous short story. Llansol, who often draws, without pretension, in her notebooks and who brings the two forms of expression together, talks, with respect to her aeolian eros

163

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 164

(ingenuous, ‘expressionist’, gestural, constructivist...) drawings, of two types of vibration: that of the breath that passes through them, and that of a ‘thought in harmony’. Here I also discover that dual vibration: in Pomar, his hand seems to be guided by an intuition about the lines to be set down, about forces in action, rather than by forms; in Chafes, despite the relative lightness of these works, there is more of the weight of an idea — of something more slowly envisioned, conceived and executed through the work of the craftsman’s hand. Here, in the heart of iron, there is a gestation; there in the imponderable and repeated impulse of the pencil, an eruption. Here, thought; there, wind. And different versions of the same wind of Eros running through the work of both, one of them drawing in space, and the other sculpting, constructing movement on the plane. Then of course, there is what is specific to each of them. This is also something that must be discussed.

2. Pomar: The breath of There is The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas defined the There is (il y a) as the murmur of the world (a ‘brumor’ [mist-murmur], Llansol would call it), ‘something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full’ (Levinas). The experience of the There is leads to the realisation that what seems to be an absence becomes a presence, like a dense atmosphere, yet one that is light and distant. * In the Fig tree notebook series, it seems to me that Júlio Pomar seeks to transform this ‘brumor’ of the world into something that can be heard, rather than to ‘represent the unrepresentable’. Pomar confirms: ‘Looking at a drawing is using the gaze to listen to the echoes of this trace, of what it says, what it suggests, what it keeps quiet’ (Temas e Variações. Parte escrita III, 218). 164

joão barrento

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 165

* Indeed, this is not about representation. It is about imbuing the line (of the drawing) with what, among the leaves of the fig tree, is elemental in nature: the wind and the movement it produces. The rest, if there is a rest, is left with the fig tree, it is not what the eyes and the pencil seek in it. The gaze is aimed at another part of the landscape, that part which the work ‘bears witness to’, as Llansol once again writes, this time in an unpublished 1988 text: ‘The journey begins in the body when the body slips from the real to another non-existent-real. It doesn’t slip into fantasy: our gaze sees one part of the landscape, and bears witness to the other.’ This bearing witness is the drawing (the drawing/sculpture) in front of us. * Júlio Pomar confirms: ‘I don’t invent anything and I don’t trust imagination’ (O Artista Fala, 83). The gaze merely sees, looks upon, and runs the risk — because this is a risky gesture — of transforming what ‘does not appear’ into traces, lines, signs. What takes place (as in the relationship between Rui Chafes’s works and their title) is not a representation of the object, but an allusion to its ‘shadow’. The shadow of the fig tree is breath, the shadow of the bodies is desire. We are not on a plane of the empirical and its ontology, but on the plane of a metaphysics of immanence. What speaks here is a kind of excluded third party — neither the I nor the object —, which manifests itself as the presence of a decisive absence. * The fig trees again. Each drawing — and there are many of them, since what is heard and what is intended to be seen/heard is insistent and swift — seeks to fix the image of an impression (not of a tree), of a turmoil (‘the fixed image knows no repose’, Pomar reminds us, echoing Blanchot). We do not know exactly why it is thus, nor how everything takes place, but it is thus — because a wind passed by and spread onto the paper… aeolian eros

165

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 166

* Like the writing of bodies in the erotic drawings that, on the lower level of the Studio-Museum, enter into dialogue with Rui Chafes’s free constellation, As tuas mãos. Here one can clearly see what, according to Pomar, interests him in drawing: ‘The vitality of the line and the accuracy of the allusion’ (Temas e Variações, 126). His erotic drawings of women and couples are, in this large format series, lines of force of a forest of barely alluded to intensities. * Were it not for the need to leave the floor clear, in order to be able to move under and between the undulating lines of Rui Chafes’s contortionistic interplay of forms, these large drawings by Pomar could be exhibited horizontally, like the result of a ‘cross section’ through the symbolic force and through the signs of desire of the lying bodies, offering themselves for mutual pleasure. I imagine some of them, enlarged to the size of the entire available space and covering the floor, responding to the energy that emanates from the dull black fire of the dance of Eros performed by the aerial forms of the sculpture, held merely by some crossed wires, the geometric component of this undulating drawing. (This is suggested to me by a short text by Walter Benjamin, ‘On paintings, signs and marks’, in which, based on the idea that there are ‘two sections through the substance of the world’, it is suggested that paintings should be seen on the vertical wall but that drawing, particularly children’s drawing, is inseparably associated with the horizontal position. Drawing is a mesh of signs, painting a dense composition of marks or forms.) * In the two series of drawings by Júlio Pomar in this exhibition — the ‘fig trees’ and the nudes — it can be said that what we see are works that lack an object — despite clearly alluding, through their name or through 166

joão barrento

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 167

the movement of the line, to trees and bodies. The objects are not immediately presented to our gaze (they present themselves to each other), but our gaze gradually reconstructs them through their signalling of another dimension, among the luminous jungle of lines, following the dynamic movement of forms that are barely sketched, suggested, like Mallarmé’s poetic images (‘to suggest, that is the dream’). * The drawings — the series of drawings — lack an object, yet they are possessed by their own daimon that gives them Aeolian and erotic life, made of winds and desire, of a hidden force that generates and permeates them, and that after some time we see with the eyes of intuition. And we have to see them with those eyes because, as in the unrepeatable gesture of the dance in Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, these too are unique gestures, born of the moment, characterised by an ‘innocence’ that is the innocence of a paradise that is lost and closed for ever. Access, which can only be conscious, and uninteresting, to some substitute for paradise by the back door of some form of ‘realism’, will not be found here. Realists, said Paul Klee in his Bauhaus lectures on the line (the essence of drawing, which he termed ‘monochromatic sheets’), do not see the line and deny its true existence; for the ‘idealist’ (which is ultimately every artist when freed from the prisons of representation) it is not necessary to see it, but only to feel it, in order to be able to conclude: it exists! And a poet of our times, Yves Bonnefoy, used different words to make the same statement in an unsurpassably succinct way: drawing is ‘the great figuration’ without content, the manifestation of presence revealing itself, the ground zero of mimesis, and in it ‘the prescience of the invisible’ takes shape (‘O desenho e a voz’, Colóquio-Letras 176, January 2011). And Derrida also stated (in Mémoires d’aveugle) that drawing is deliberately ‘without design’. * aeolian eros

167

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 168

I turn again to Kleist, and his revealing text on marionettes. ‘Each movement [each line]’, he said, ‘will have a centre of gravity; it would suffice to direct this crucial point in the inside of the figure…’ Júlio Pomar might say: there is not exactly a centre that can be directed nor, in principle, an inside of the figure (at best, this may be discovered a posteriori by the viewer). Kleist also reveals that the line of the centre of gravity is both very simple and very mysterious, and that it is ‘nothing other than the path of the dancer’s soul’. Perhaps here Pomar might wonder: in the dance-song-writing of the drawing and its original chaos, how can a centre of gravity be found? At first sight, it is absent, yet the forest of signs/strokes/movement must have an origin, come from a source… * Perhaps Klee provided the answer when he said that the drawing is made of signs and processes that ‘reveal what [can be revealed and] has been secretly viewed’ (the turbulence of the fig trees, or the decentred nodules of the imbalance of the bodies in the nude drawings in this exhibition). Llansol, in some notes on drawing, shows that she also understands this way of seeing. In one of the books in which she most clearly shows awareness of some of the processes of drawing (and of writing and its transition towards other forms of expression), she writes: ‘Teresa (…), ask the pencil to agree to draw what it doesn’t see’; and ‘In the notebook… / the drawing, the design for something to make itself, with impatience and hesitation, certainly, but accepting deformation…’ (Ardente Texto Joshua, Relógio D’Água, 1998, pp. 55, 130). * Drawing [de-senho], de-sire, de-sign, de-formation — corresponding and responding to each other.

168

joão barrento

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 169

3. Chafes: Cold fire In some German romantic and European symbolist literature the topos of the ‘cold heart’ (kaltes Herz) is a strong presence: an opposition in which the extremes cancel each other out in order to merge into a third object — the work, or its effect on the one who sees it. The metaphor, unmistakeably modern, but derived from the tales of Hoffmann, Tieck, Hofmannsthal and the French symbolists (which deal with petrified or vitriolated miners, and automata with a soul), is always linked with enigmatic and unsettling (unheimlich) contexts in which the organic becomes mineral and the living is petrified or crystallised. Or also the opposite, in the stories in which the inert acquires life, or the automaton becomes an object of desire. The dialectic of these opposites, which seems to me to be closely related to something fundamental in the work of Rui Chafes, manifests itself in the oppositions — which are not in fact oppositions — between heart and stone (or crystal), hot and cold, fire and iron, life and death. Interestingly, the piece that is repeated, in variations, in the work that Rui Chafes now titles Down, emerged back in 2008 with a title that could be related to this tradition: Your heart is sleeping, don’t wake it too early. And also some of the (highly eroticised) drawings in his exhibition that year at the Fundação Carmona e Costa, titled Khora, are part of this form that is the ‘outline of a woman’. * In all of these narratives there is a suggestion of a ‘magical effect of the mineral’ (iron) and a ‘mineralisation of the organic’, which are at the heart of a type of poetic message similar to that of the Romanticism of Jena, particularly that of a poet and mining engineer such as Novalis, a definitive point of reference in Rui Chafes’s career. This poetics and that apparent opposition also give a sense of depth to the sculptor’s works, if we consider the relationship that informs them, between the material work (iron) and aeolian eros

169

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 170

the ‘poetic organicity’ of their titles, which, according to the artist, are what is most important. This importance of the word, which I highlighted over a decade ago in another text on his work, led me at that point to draw an (unsurprising) parallel between Chafes and Novalis, seeing in both of them a Sprachbegeisterter, ‘someone possessed by the spirit of words’. It is for this reason the sculptor is able to say, paradoxically, that what he makes is ‘poetry’, that ‘it is the word that traces the seeds’. And I wrote, in 2002, on this point: ‘The importance of the word and of titles in Rui Chafes’s work is such that it is possible to show how, in his artistic project as a sculptor, it is the poetic matter that illuminates the inevitable opacity of things in the world, it is the poetry that tends to make up for the emptiness and the non-existence of the object’ (‘Rui Chafes: O erro do mundo’, in: A Escala do Meu Mundo, 206-207). * The underlying principle to such a poetics, the principle figure that underpins it, is that of the oxymoron, present in the indivisible duality of the binomial Beauty — Death. Or also, thinking about the lines of force that guide all of Chafes’s work, in the tension between the latent violence (of the world and of history) and its poetic counterpart in works such as those in this exhibition, in which there is a freeing from this more gloomy and mournful side, in favour of a flight and of rhythms that evoke the lightness of the original ruah or of the mutable movement of Eros, which is the subtle design of the drawing in the series of outlines, ‘between earth and sky’, the finitude of black and the infinite blue. Other works by Rui Chafes also express this principle, which is that of poetry and of life, in the indivisibility of light and of shade, of the Yes and the No, once more following the trail of a poet of beauty and of death, this time Paul Celan: ‘Speak — / But don’t split off No from Yes. / Give your say this meaning too: / Give it the shadow […] // Speaks true who speaks shadow.’ This might also be a leitmotif for all of Rui Chafes’s work. 170

joão barrento

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 171

* And another might be that of the angel. In ‘A história da minha vida’ (‘The story of my life’) (which in fact should be called, more fittingly, ‘A história da minha arte’ [‘The story of my art’]!) the artist recalls how, in his youth, he specialised in sculpting ‘angels’ smiles’ in the master’s workshop of Reims Cathedral. The ‘dense/light’ nature of Rui Chafes’s works in this exhibition is in this vein. But the angel also has another side, which transforms it into an oxymoronic figure, equally applicable to the spirit of this work: Rilke’s ‘terrible angel’ — which is only thus because humans have many limits and they have the fatal ‘error of distinguishing’, proclaiming simultaneously, in open nostalgia for that smile, the joy of existence, because ‘being here is glorious’, and the unsayable must be said. It is the same tension, the same underlying melancholy or nostalgia that sustain the unstable equilibrium between weight and lightness, cold iron and the poetic breath, in the sculpture and drawing of Rui Chafes (and of his influences and peers: Tilman Riemenschneider and Stefano Maderno, Bernini and Philipp Otto Runge, Novalis and Kleist). * Looking at Rui Chafes’s works in this exhibition, the fundamental question re-poses itself: what is a sculpture by Rui Chafes? Faced with these threedimensional and aerial drawings, an answer occurs to me, the answer Llansol gives to the question ‘What is a figure?’, saying: ‘modules, contours, delineations’. Delineations is very apt here, all drawing does nothing more than delineate. The sculptor defines this very succinctly: ‘a line exists and makes sense alongside another line — just that’. Drawing is in fact the only form of art (is it art?) that de-lineates — and it needs nothing more. Delineating is sketching, preparing. Yet, unlike those artists (painters, sculptors, and architects too) for whom drawing is a preliminary stage, a preparation for a ‘greater’ work, which will then disappear under the weight of its materiality (the thickness of the ink, the opacity of the stone or metal, the constructed mass), here — both in aeolian eros

171

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 172

Chafes’s sculptures/drawings and in Pomar’s quick-fire drawings — drawing prepares, at most, an encounter (with the viewer and the viewer’s gaze); or another plane of itself, the plane that reveals what is beyond its lines, and through them, there is no other path. This perspective has the nature of transcendence in Rui Chafes, and of apparition in Júlio Pomar. And both are part of the dialectic of presence/absence in drawing as pure figuration, not representation. * I turn again to Kleist’s dancer, but they might also be Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘metaphysical’ figures. These appear like one from another sphere — ‘of a higher order’, Kleist writes. That of the antigravitational soul of matter, I would say, thinking about Chafes’s sculptures/drawings, which, like the Romantic poet’s marionettes, have the advantage of ‘know[ing] nothing of the inertia of matter’ and that ‘like elves, (…) need only to touch upon the ground’. Rui Chafes’s sculpture, even in the heavier pieces, is positioned (positions us) in a tension between the weight of matter (lightened here by movement and free composition in space) and the infinity of the soul, between the non-awareness characteristic of lost paradise and the infinite awareness of any idea of God. Perfection, if it exists, we think when we see them, will never be in the middle, in a potential equilibrium of reason, but at the extremes — of the line and the spiritual unconscious. It is in this sense that the work is positioned between an origin and a destiny. Between what it lacks because it cannot be retrieved (closed paradise), yet which emerges in it; and a destiny that is not the one to which it is condemned, but the one that it promises, its destination. The ‘dull blackness’ of Rui Chafes’s drawn sculptures is this place of the original night, which ‘absorbs rather than reflects light’. * Llansol, who did not see this exhibition, once again provides me with the key to an impossible synthesis. 172

joão barrento

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 173

For Your Hands: ‘Space: it is not as it is habitually described, it has its own innervation.’ For the outlines of Down: ‘… its body is a complete drawing’; ‘a drawing sketched in an uncertain and centreless shadow.’

4. Face-to-face The exhibition ‘Drawing’ is not merely a juxtaposition of works, in a more or less accomplished arrangement of spaces. It brings the mark of an ethics and also a poetics of encounter. The first could be presided over by a philosopher such as Levinas; the second is familiar from poets such as Edmond Jabès or Paul Celan. Celan once wrote (following a failed encounter) a ‘conversation in the mountains’ between two who are the same yet different and who unexpectedly meet each other. In this exhibition, the encounter takes place in the right surroundings, the studio, the ultimate unclosed place of availability — for the work and for the other. And in the silence of the neutral plain of art, with no mountains in view, because art and nature are distinct (but not hostile) realms, which at other times encounter each other without friction or tragedy (both artists know this): ‘the stones too were silent. And it was quiet in the mountains where they walked, one and the other.’; ‘and the silence [was] no silence at all. No word has come to an end and no phrase, it is nothing but a pause…’ (Paul Celan). A pause — a suspension of time to allow everyone to breathe, an interval in space to allow each person to look at the other — that will make way for the emergence of an individual discourse, which is not conversation/evasion, but each person’s words to another. The other listens to them, but does not follow them, as happens with Celan’s two Jews in the mountain, each one talks, essentially for a Nobody, a That that is on the other side of the drawing, and hangs in the closed and so open air of the studio, aeolian eros

173

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 174

and pulls and connects the lines that flutter in the space, on the paper, on the walls, placed there by a Breath, a Wind, the impulse of a hand, the work of fire… Emmanuel Levinas would say: here, both are face, looking at each other. Face is what one is without a mask, and without anything else: ‘the face is meaning all by itself. You are you.’ Here, encounter is response, which is the same as saying responsibility (of each person for and on account of himself, and of the relationship that has been contracted with the other). The authentic relationship that is breathed here — even in the installation that places on the same visual plane, without hierarchies, the graphite of Pomar’s large-scale drawings and the iron of Chafes’s constellation of black lines: materials, ultimately, that have the same mineral origin — is a face-to-face relationship, the face being here a totally depersonalised notion. Each one has their own words, a discourse, their own way of speaking, in other words, a way of responding, not merely of being and looking. The poetics that is born here is (like that of Jabès, the stateless exile whose home is the world) that of a place of welcoming and of a discourse of hospitality, in an encounter in which both parties are guest and host. A poetics of the gift: there is receiving and giving, the word of the lines and of the forms is there, in the house of the other that is also my house, and it responds, co-responds.

174

joão barrento

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 175

D E - S I D E R AT I O

Maria João Mayer Branco and if not darkness, we seek some veiling shadow, and something less exposed than the light of day Ovid, The Art of Love

The exhibition begins with a separation: the windows have been closed, excluding daylight and its regulating rhythm. Whoever enters leaves behind the ordinary time and space in which works and days, relentlessly, unfold. If it is true that art ‘only emerges with the city’, the assumption here is that it ‘does not belong to the city’.1 The Studio-Museum is public, yet it has been reconfigured as a place of retreat, of shelter. It has been conceived as a chamber, ‘a small chamber in a shady villa’,2 part of a larger space, a part that has been placed apart. We are in a time before architecture. Before the house, the museum, as if somewhere on the margins of the world. As a result of the separating gesture, we barely recognise this place. With the openings and concentration of light supressed in a kind of large central clearing, there are few traces of what illuminates and almost suspends the division between exterior and interior, incorporating the building ‘discreetly into the architectural fabric of the neighbourhood’.3 Before now, there was barely any discontinuity, strangeness, and thus, real transition. Until now, we were, so to speak, at home. Now we move forward, hesitantly, into a kind of reserve of life, where our presence is infinitely ambiguous. We are visitors, that is to say, welcome and strangers at the same time. The constant and uniform lighting, indifferent to the rhythm of daily life, exudes the longing of a light that is human, yet sovereign. It is an announceDE - SIDERATIO

175

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 176

ment and a warning: something has been interrupted, something that we knew or thought we knew must be suspended. Nothing here is ‘natural’. The light is a lie; the installation, an artifice; the relationship between the works exhibited, a gamble where nothing is certain. A spatial hierarchy has been installed, a verticality, and the divisions are now linked by principles unknown to geometry: below and above, falling and flight, well and mezzanine, life and death, beginning and end. Two separate planes that, nonetheless, constantly communicate. Below, we cannot see what vision rises out of this lower plane; once above, it is impossible to ignore the depths into which we may plunge again at any moment. The separating gesture is, initially, a gesture of negation and limitation: it separates from collective life, from the shared world, from the invincible rhythm of nature. It artificially interrupts the habitual course of things, it describes a limit, which is the condition of the existence of art. Limits create distance and protect, they attenuate what, without them, is violent or potentially destructive. Loving and dying, for example. The order of the city, also called ‘the world of work’, imposes ‘rules upon sensual forces’ and ‘[limits] the disorders which proclaim the power of death (…) checking the tumult of passions which unrestricted animality releases.’4 This ordered, regulated world in which human life — ‘our life, a world’5 — is possible, also emerged with a ‘no’, a ‘no’ to the movement of nature, to violence, to the excess which it implies. Work, which is the condition for the appearance of art, and with which it can be said that man emerges, introduces a pause into the irrepressible natural instability, a discontinuity, a more or less lasting interval in the incessant sequence of generation and destruction that nature consists of. Our world is a world of limits, in which man shelters from an element that is excessive. And which, nevertheless, irremediably constitutes him. Limits regulate, organize, order, but they are a ‘suspension’, ‘not a final standstill’.6 In other words, the withdrawal they impose in relation to excess itself allows interruptions, transgressions, disturbances. In the pause, reality 176

maria joão mayer branco

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 177

appears maimed by inadequacy, it is sensed as ‘sad’,7 and excess appears as the unexpected or unexpectable, like ‘everything that is more than that which is’.8 In works of art, it is revived, and it is in that sense that they transgress, negate or separate themselves from the world, creating, as in this exhibition, ‘a space of silence’ that enables ‘deceleration, retraction, contraction’.9 Art transgresses the world of work, it separates itself from it, in the sense that it goes beyond stability, predictability, calculability. Such a transgression, however, the negation of the ‘stifling regularity of the human order’,10 does not destroy what it transgresses. Art presupposes the world that it interrupts, from which it separates itself and against which it protests, but without which it could not exist: the trivial world of objects that are ‘touchable and unrestrictedly accessible’.11 It could be said that this is what takes place here, a gesture of discreet protest that reveals the ‘need for a more profound, a richer, a marvellous world’.12 This unlikely and in various senses pioneering exhibition is about art, in the sense that art responds to a desire for the marvellous. The works exhibited are thus ‘fascinating objects’,13 before which we immediately sense our limits (of understanding, of access, of knowledge). They repeat the moment of art’s emergence, the moment — in other words — of transgression and subversion, in which all art consists and with which ‘the communication between individuals-minds begins’.14

there will be no peace for the one who loves Herberto Helder (1930–2015)

The artists presented here, a painter and a sculptor, are both Portuguese and belong to different generations. Their works create two worlds with different languages and lineages, which have now consented to come together under the general title ‘Drawing’. Both artists write about their work and are concerned with what art is still capable of being, with the ‘relaDE - SIDERATIO

177

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 178

tions between the regulated and the unregulated’, the ‘sense that what is taken for granted can become something else.’15 In a ‘society without happiness’, they attempt to ‘shift the viewer to a point where a new construction of reality can take place’.16 That is what this exhibition is, and what it is about. Against all expectations to the contrary, it invites us to believe that ‘there always remains the possibility of some sudden imperious call from without, and of a response to it: then the established, the expected are shattered’.17 The exhibition presents ‘drawings’ by Júlio Pomar and Rui Chafes, and their arrangement within the museum seems to clarify, if not the ‘theme’, at least the meaning that we propose giving them. The meaning, in other words, a set of questions, that begins with a glimpse of the piece As tuas mãos/Your hands, 1998-2013. As we enter, we are startled, almost threatened, by a group of black forms positioned at the same height as us, and by our uncertainty about their apparent movement. We don’t know if we can walk among these pieces, if they fly or swim, if they are going to fall or if, incredibly, they support the space that they occupy. After our initial shock, we realise that the floating, undulating, curvilinear sculptures are suspended by steel wires, secured by the tension of long metallic straight lines. Their distribution in space evokes a dance, a ballet of organic forms that hang, delicately, in the air, joined in pairs or in circles of three elements. They are immobile, as if prohibited, yet the dance has not ended, it has merely been interrupted (by art). We move closer and realise that the movements are as if frozen in time and space, they have been deprived of the heat that animates them, deprived of the life that, clearly, they do not possess. They are iron sculptures, dead things exhibited at what appears to be a moment of joyful agony. They describe a gentle anonymous tumult, the nameless and faceless shiver that runs through bodies and things, the dance that has ‘no fixed appearance’.18 Dancing is coming out (of oneself ) and this is what is dealt with here: a giving of oneself that is abandoning (oneself ), surpassing oneself, being 178

maria joão mayer branco

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 179

unable to stay, a departure that is, simultaneously, an infinite arrival, a ‘leaving without going away’.19 In their ex-position, these sculptures evoke a kind of consensual suffering, Dantesque and moving at the same time, and they show us what it means to become lost and left at the mercy of ‘your hands’. The rigorously calculated scale and position of the pieces allow us to move, hesitantly at first, and then unwaveringly, among the fragments that seem to shiver, silently, painfully and pleasurably, with pain and with pleasure. Only as accomplices, by obeying or — better still — trusting in the artist’s fantasy, can we understand the abandonment that the pull of the wires explores, exhibits and provokes, understand it with and as our own abandonment. The wires prevent the pieces from touching the ground, and the overall declining direction of the ‘movement’ brings to mind the moment that comes just before the fall. We are startled by the curious impression that we too are also a little lost, abandoned, tempted and touched by the dance in which, in fact, we have already entered. Being in the hands of a work of art can resemble a dance, when it means having been expelled from one’s place, shifted, moved. When it means something like arriving or appearing for the first time, a birth or rebirth whose result is that ‘the one who falls no longer knows where he falls.’20 On one of the walls surrounding As tuas mãos eight drawings by Júlio Pomar embody the same dance. More precisely, and contrasting to the somehow impersonal (but by no means general) dance in the piece by Chafes, these works show pairs of human bodies, one male and one female. They belong to a 1976-1979 series titled Étreinte [Embrace] and their force overrides the embarrassment that grips us as we look at them, that is to say, it overrides the limits that shame imposes on the extreme emotion provoked by the sight of human copulation. These drawings are simultaneously embarrassing and fascinating. We want to look and at the same time we want to look away, to stay, to participate and at the same time run away from their power, from their indiscretion. They are images of what, for us, is without image: the ‘dance-before-the-dance’, the strange ‘going-with, goDE - SIDERATIO

179

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 180

ing-together (co-ire) of the sexual embrace (of coitus)’.21 We see the sexes that seek each other (in truth, predominantly the male sex seeking the female), the sometimes gentle, sometimes intense lines, the variation of the rhythms and vibrations of this going that is a coming, of the ‘journey, as abrupt as it is infinite, of lovers (…) that is reiterated as much as it strives to be reborn’.22 We do not see faces — the dance is a ‘body before it is a face’23 — only profiles and silhouettes of a reclining or panting head, and we imagine the mouths, the breath they exhale and the heat that welcomes them. We see the urgency and the delay, the different speeds of a frenzy that disabuses the bodies of the promise of possession. The étreinte implies not so much possession, but being possessed or dispossessed, transported or abducted, in other words, by an ‘intruder’24 who visits us, who assaults us, who wrenches us out of ourselves. The body, which was a ‘bridge’, becomes ‘a chasm’,25 and the skin, the surface, an infinitely evasive deepness. The body is what separates us, the physical and inviolable limit that isolates us and determines our unyielding individuality. There is a discontinuity between our bodies; they have always been and will always be separate. Nothing can cancel out the unbreachable hiatus that distances them, even though evoking this chasm immediately leads to the ‘feeling that this is not the whole truth of the matter’.26 Pomar’s drawings show how badly we withstand separation, the discontinuity that irremediably distinguishes and limits us, at the same time as they reject the idea of a ‘primal continuity’,27 of a ‘fusional communion’,28 ‘where both are mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution’.29 The bodies that make love in front of or a little above our gaze do not seek to dissolve their limits, to cancel out the discontinuity that separates them, to open out ‘to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity.’ What they display is the opposite of communion, of a continuum that dissipates all limits, in other words the inverse of death understood as a conclusive night that dissolves and homogenises everything. We are not in darkness, it must be remembered, but in a chamber, in the 180

maria joão mayer branco

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 181

veiling shadow, in other words, whose gloom may allow us to see more than we see. What we have then in these drawings is not a dissolving end, but the life of bodies mutually desiring and animating each other — and not with a view to their destruction, their sacrifice, the supreme violence that is death. Thus the lines overlap each other, yet without any possibility of blending, and not even the almost abstract versions truly suggest the total dissolution of outlines, of limbs, of sexes (whose difference is, furthermore, always recognisable and even, in some cases, emphatically and graphically underlined). Touching, penetrating, kissing, embracing does not thus imply here the end of discontinuity or of a separation, so to speak, that precedes the étreinte and that the latter seeks to cancel out. Quite to the contrary, the always imminent dissolution is shown in and through its deferral, through its postponement. There is no point of arrival in this crossing created by a to-and-fro that has no resting place nor rest, a coming and going that, like the works of art, has nowhere to lay its head.30 The journey traced here is possible, not because of the dissolution of the limits of each of the lovers, the suppression of what separates them, but through the intense sharing of this same separation, their unyielding inadequacy for the excess to which they are exposed. The mutual exhibition of these bodies is thus the at-thelimit experience of the limits of each one, the infinite surprise of the impropriety of the other through which my own is revealed, a reciprocal shock that goes beyond all the limits of what we think we know. The excess of the sexual relation implies a relationship with the infinitely evasive, with an absence. It is a relationship with ‘the not being there of the self ’31, that is to say, with the future, the opposite of the end, the contrary of paralysis. Desiring the absent — as in mourning, as in art — is not desiring death (of the other or our own), to which, in fact, we will never be able to relate. For this reason, if pleasure is a small death, then it is not pleasure that the sexual relation seeks, since pleasure ‘threatens desire’.32 In pleasure, ‘something ends’.33 Pleasure dissolves, sates, concludes, renders DE - SIDERATIO

181

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 182

invisible what desire barely starts to reveal. Desire is the opposite of exhaustion, of satiety, of amorphism and it is an image of desire that Júlio Pomar presents to us here, revealing that to draw is indeed to desire. These works are also ‘fascinating objects’ in that they ‘last beyond the satisfaction they provide, and even within the pleasure that they bring’.34 They live and they resist, thus, because they are art, in other words ‘the indestructible desire’, ‘desire without pleasure, appetite without satiety, life without death.’35 Placed a little above the height of our gaze and in reality consisting more of inscriptions than representations, they evoke the images of the caves of Lascaux and Altamira, which Pomar had the fortune to visit. Like those images, they also attempt to respond to ‘that expectation of the miraculous which is, in art and in passion, the most profound aspiration of life’, the expectation of that which ‘staggers’ us and which ‘we hold worthy of our love’.36 Let us call it dance once more, a dance of bodies that is, strictly speaking, the ‘dance of the spirit’.37 Fascinated, surprised by these ‘still images’ ‘that make us move’,38 we are moved, drawn into the realisation that what ‘touches us [is what] we are stirred by.39

Either I love and die Or I live and do not love. Ana Hatherly (1929–2015)

The Étreinte series was inspired by the words of a woman.40 And the figure of a woman pervades the entire exhibition, constituted by the works of two men. In some way this figure becomes confused here with both life and death, with day and with night. More precisely, it signals the day that becomes night, the metamorphosis without remains, transformation or ‘plasticity’ understood as ‘the transgression of presence.’41 Or even, to use the words of another woman, understood as ‘impermanence’, as ‘intermittence’.42 Perhaps the image that best illustrates this here is a small untitled 182

maria joão mayer branco

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 183

and undated charcoal drawing by Júlio Pomar, discreetly placed, as it were, by the door to the stairs that lead to the second level of the museum (Study [Untitled], undated). It is a ‘study’, an exercise or, according to its etymology, a tireless pursuit, one attempt that will be followed by many others. Charcoal lines describe a kind of beating of wings that expands gracefully, creating a fluttering body that could be either animal or vegetable. It is a winged organism, composed of two female sexes and it rises up as if celebrating its infinite permutation. It is a bird, or perhaps a flower or a small flame, a form that modestly celebrates the simplicity of its appearance, the ‘originary movement’.43 After the experience of the works that are now behind us, this drawing holds us for a moment in what we might describe as the ‘uncertain fluttering between disappearance and appearance before another’, seeming to ask: ‘do you see me?’, or rather, ‘do you recognise me?’.44 And this question marks the beginning of a new stage in the journey proposed by this exhibition. We climb the stairs that lead to the upper level of the building. Halfway up there are four other ‘studies’ by Pomar (Nude studies [Notebook with studies for nude], undated). They are studies of female models, exercises, once more, in which the eye learns to be a hand (or vice versa) and where, almost touching, it reproduces the seen body, or rather, the pose adopted by that body as it collaborates with the hands that see it. The bodies are of young girls in positions that are, so to speak, artificially natural. These young girls or adolescents, already in puberty and distracted, lie down or sit, sleep or wait calmly, reclining on the pillow, resting their chin on their knees, or crossing their bare arms thoughtfully. Being looked at does not concern them. Unlike the being we have just been looking at, they are — as already mentioned — distracted, concentrating on something else, lost in thought, removed from themselves and from where they are, from the reality of their appearance. Each study shows two bodies, as if each had called up its double, or if it had been duplicated by the very fact of being drawn. The duplication seems to reinforce the girls’ absence from themselves, signalling the repose that DE - SIDERATIO

183

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 184

allows us to be two (the one who is there and the one who thinks). These young girls suggest the birth of awareness, of the reflectiveness that is accentuated with puberty and leads us to leave behind our previous state of innocence about ourselves. They are on the threshold of grace, knowing nothing of what others think of them, immediately prior to the notion of being seen, prior to the burden of the gaze of others, of the desire of others, which can either torment us or free us (from ourselves). The girls’ rather Degas-esque poses and hairstyles — with short dark fringes across their faces and their hair pulled back at the neck — keep us vaguely within the realm of dance (which is also grace). Yet these dancers are at rest and we can look at them without the disquiet caused by the works on the first level. They are exercises, attempts, the simple perfecting of an activity, exercised without a final aim and without viewers, preceding art, preceding the work. It was previously stated that this exhibition was about the birth of art, and this becomes clearer as the visitor moves forward. Far from being self-referential gestures, the various ‘drawings’ set out the issue or question that art can become, both for its maker and for the viewer. For example, with respect to the ‘intimate conflict’ between ‘the process and action of constructing the work and the realisation of its final conclusion’, the dilemma, in other words between ‘embracing experimentation, the unfinished, or moving to the utopian phase of conclusion.’45 If Júlio Pomar seems to commit himself to the second possibility, declaring himself to be closer to Picasso than to Duchamp,46 the sculptures that Rui Chafes calls ‘melancholic prostheses of a world in extinction’ give form, in turn, to ‘the tragedy of the fragment’.47 And yet here things don’t unfold in such a clear way. The hands drawn by the painter, which we come across as we arrive on the second level (Studies [Hands], 1953) are again — and not for the last time — ‘studies’, experiments, expressions of an unfinished quest, here made prominent or distinguished by a red, meridional background. Salvaged in this way from mere academicism, from the instrumental status ascribed to simple prac184

maria joão mayer branco

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 185

tice, they underline the correspondence between the hand that makes and the hand that is made or drawn; the human hand surprised by itself, discovering itself. The artist gives us his hands — the prerequisites, in other words, for art and work, which expose us and protect us, with their actions, from the force of ‘life, now ebbing, now surging up again’.48 This disturbing force that, as mentioned previously, is limited by work, is, once again, reanimated by art. Yet this happens less by fusion or identification, than by the artist’s approach to ‘that other world of the world’,49 outside or at the threshold of which he nevertheless remains. This is what happens, once more, in the vitrine that runs alongside the same wall. Its title is also significant in this respect: O corpo não entra (The body doesn’t get through) (1989). It contains small works in coloured Fimo, modelled by Rui Chafes 15 years ago and now exhibited for the first time (like Pomar’s ‘studies’), which resemble small marine organisms (molluscs, jellyfish, seaweed, coral) and that lie here as if in a display case in a natural history museum. They are variations on the form of the female sex, they would fit in a closed hand and are separated from us by a transparent sheet of glass, preserved in a small box — in a small chamber — that impedes the temptation to touch them, impedes the body from getting in. The group recalls the collection of an enthusiast who has lovingly and unpretentiously assembled his modest finds in a drawer. The glassed display case imposes limits on contact with these vulva-like forms that are presented to our gaze, at the same time as they evade touch. This is the ‘sublime lie’50 of art. Like embarrassment, ‘due to which we retreat to a dark chamber to love’, art ‘takes away from the world’, cloaking things in an aura and distancing them from ‘violent closeness’.51 Art is not life, and art is ‘puritanical’52 — like the hand of this sculptor, which, by giving, preserves; by offering, takes away (and withdraws himself ). As we look at these small works we think of Duchamp’s woman, referred to by Júlio Pomar when he underlines the craft-like quality of Étant Donnés.53 We think of this faceless ‘absent, hidden’ woman who lies, as if fallen from DE - SIDERATIO

185

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 186

the sky, ‘finally presented to our vision, yet still entirely withheld’.54 All her fascination lies in her appearance. She is Doña Ana ‘resting in the landscape’, Doña Ana when she dares ‘to be Don Juan’: women / lay them down / lay them down in the landscape / all seek / the / opening / the / journey / essences; the passage, however, is a centre (Ana Hatherly). Now we move along the balcony that opens over the lower floor, where As tuas mãos whirl, immobile, down below. We are above them, we can see them in the distance. They no longer threaten us, although their silence continues to tempt us, to call to us. Seen from here, the dancing ocean seems to fit in the space of a well, of the deep trench whose every undulation presents us with the image of what we are, an irremediable contradiction between what we know and what we hope for. The waves appear and disappear as we move around up above. On another wall, there is a further series of drawings by Júlio Pomar (Untitled [Drawings from fig tree notebook]. Undated [from the 1960s]). They show dancing arabesques, more or less smooth curves that describe gentle and almost abstract movements. They are from a sketchbook in which the painter drew, dozens of times (the six shown here are just a small selection of the whole group), a fig tree that he saw from the window of his house. More precisely, according to the painter, the drawings capture the wind blowing through this tree, whose fruit is a ‘covert nakedness’, the ‘fruit of the female mystery’ (D.H. Lawrence/Herberto Helder). There are no leaves on these bare branches, the breeze has taken the leaves sewn by Eve to hide her own and Adam’s indecency, when ‘she knew in her mind that she was naked’. Since then, it is said, women ‘have their nakedness more than ever on their mind / And they won’t let us forget it’. They hide themselves to appear, their clothes separate them, limit the closeness they provoke. Thus withdrawn, apparently distanced, women inspire, arouse the spirit that makes them appear, as in the works in this ex186

maria joão mayer branco

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 187

hibition, more or less delicately, while the ‘saints lower / their eyelids’, blessing the wind that blows, blessing the persistence of this very human ‘capacity to be stirred’ (Ana Hatherly). Even when they are most exposed, and in contrast to men, it is the nature of women not to be able to see themselves. Women do not see what they hide, what their body brings with it and anatomy separates from their angle of vision, the sex that they will never be able to see face on. In this sense, woman is like death: present, yet hidden, impossible to locate, invisible, incalculable. We need images of death precisely because we have no image of it, we have no vision of it, we have no knowledge of it. In the last work in this exhibition (Penugem [Down], 2015), Rui Chafes offers us a figure for this unfigurable, and this figure — female — is composed of 17 sculptures. Lined up side by side, they occupy a wall that is partially painted in a greyish blue, a cold tone emphasised by the lighting that evokes that of a refrigerated chamber. One last time, a chamber preserves these 17 ‘bodies’ or ‘drawings’, corpses of what the artist called ‘women who didn’t want to grow up’. They are slender, black forms in which a line links two almost parallel circles (the lower, smaller one, slightly further back than the upper one). They recall collars, hanging there, austere and fragile, each one different and seemingly secluded at the same time as they are exposed. The chamber, now a mortuary chamber, is the image of an infinite mourning, of the inarticulate lament that art gives form to. As in the ancient gesture of placing the dead apart, in the belief that this shelters them, lovingly protects them, from the irremediable profanation that they will suffer, this work, situated on the first floor, contrasts with the vibrant life that lies on the ground floor and also in the colours of the facing wall. It reveals the impossible, a death that preserves the female bodies, bodies that are already sexualised, but which will not reproduce, preserved from the metamorphosis to which they were promised. Down inverts or transgresses the idea we have of the experience of dying, that is to say the idea of the violent disappearance of a body, of its destruction, of its dissolution in a definitive night. It is preDE - SIDERATIO

187

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 188

cisely the violence of this idea that art takes on and fights, going beyond and limiting what has no limits, and will never have limits, revealing the invisible and teaching that ‘we can defeat terror with the image of terror’.55 Like woman, death cannot be looked at face on. The gaze must be subjected to a ‘deflection’56 that offers protection from a face-to-face encounter with what has neither name, nor face. Art is this deflection, which fascinates without definitively paralysing us, placing in the distance what we will never truly achieve separation from, the violence that we will never be able to overcome, but which can be transfigured and give rise to a collection of words that, like these, try — without any guarantee — to give it meaning. This is the proposition made by the hand that writes this text. A hand that cannot help but consider itself the hand of a woman. Of one who, besides being seen, also exposes her gaze to the recognition of others, in the conviction that recognising is not giving what one possesses and of which the other is deprived, but ‘sharing a lack’.57 The sharing consists, when it exists, of simply sharing ‘fictional power’:58 the power, in other words, that turns human misery into a wealth, an abundance of images that we all need. Lisbon, November 2015

_____________

1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 188

Jean-Luc Nancy (2011), p. 69. Pascal Quignard (1998), p. 339. Words from the text describing the architectural project at the site of the Júlio Pomar Studio-Museum: http://ateliermuseujuliopomar.pt/museu/arquitectura/arquitectura.html Georges Bataille (1955), p. 122. Júlio Pomar (2014), p. 46. Georges Bataille (1962), p. 62. Júlio Pomar (2014), p. 57. Georges Bataille (1962), p. 268. Rui Chafes (2012), p. 58. maria joão mayer branco

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 189

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Georges Bataille (1955), p. 123. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 38. Pascal Quignard (1998), p. 166. Georges Bataille (1955), p. 11. Júlio Pomar (2014), p. 86. Rui Chafes (2012), pp. 47 and 61. Georges Bataille (1955), p. 129. Pascal Quignard (2013), p. 75. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid. Ibid., p. 76. Pascal Quignard (1998), p. 263. Ibid., p. 348. Georges Bataille (1962), pp. 12-13. Ibid., p. 15. Jean-Luc Nancy (1991), p. 37. Georges Bataille (1962), p. 17. Rui Chafes, in an interview with Expresso newspaper, 8 February 2014. Pascal Quignard (2013), p. 97. Pascal Quignard (1998), p. 239. Ibid., p. 236. Ibid., p. 166. Ibid., p. 240. Georges Bataille (1955), p. 15. Georges Bataille (1955). Júlio Pomar (2014), pp. 44-45. Georges Bataille (1955), p. 130. Maria Velho da Costa, Corpo Verde, drawings by Júlio Pomar, Contexto Editora, Lisboa, 1979. Catherine Malabou (2011), p. 137. Marie-José Mondzain (2007), p. 242. Catherine Malabou (2011), p. 136. Marie-José Mondzain (2011), p. 44. Rui Chafes (2012), p. 50. Júlio Pomar (2014), p. 84. Rui Chafes (2012), p. 46. Georges Bataille (1955), p. 33. Pascal Quignard (1998), p. 289. Rui Chafes (2012), p. 49. Pascal Quignard (1998), pp. 72-73. Ibid., pp. 239, 285. DE - SIDERATIO

189

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 190

53 54 55 56 57 58

Júlio Pomar (2014), p. 84. Jean-Christophe Bailly (1984), p. 88. Pascal Quignard (1998), p. 118. Ibid. Marie-José Mondzain (2007), p. 118. Ibid., p. 46.

Works quoted Translator’s note for English version: Where possible, published English versions of texts have been found and cited accordingly. Where this has not been possible, quotes have been translated from the Portuguese translation of the original quote. Jean-Christophe Bailly, Duchamp, Fernand Hazan, Paris, 1984 Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo, Walker and Company, New York, 1962 —, Lascaux or The Birth of Art, Skira, Lausanne, 1955 (translated by Austryn Wainhouse) —, La Peinture préhistorique. Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art, Skira, Lausanne, 1955 Rui Chafes, Entre o Céu e a Terra, Sistema solar, Lisbon, 2012 Maria Velho da Costa, Corpo Verde, drawings by Júlio Pomar, Contexto Editora, Lisbon, 1979 Catherine Malabou, Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011 (translated by Carolyn Shread) Marie-José Mondzain, Homo Spectator, Bayard Éditions, Paris, 2007 —, Images (à suivre). De la poursuite au cinéma et ailleurs, Bayard, Paris, 2011 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘A arte e a cidade’ in Maia, Tomás (org.), Persistência da Obra. Arte e Política, Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2011 —, The Inoperative Community, Theory and History of Literature, Volume 76. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 1991 (edited by Peter Connor, translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney) Júlio Pomar, O Artista Fala... Conversas com Sara Antónia Matos e Pedro Faro, Cadernos do Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar, Sistema Solar, Lisbon, 2014 Pascal Quignard, L’Origine de la danse, Galilée, Paris, 2013 —, Le Sexe et l’effroi, Folio Gallimard, Paris, 1998

190

maria joão mayer branco

141-192_Pomar_Chafes_desenhar.qxp:17x21 29/12/15 16:40 Page 191

CADERNOS DO ATELIER-MUSEU JÚLIO POMAR D O C U M E N TA

Caveiras, Casas, Pedras e uma Figueira Tratado dos Olhos Notas Sobre uma Arte Útil, Parte Escrita I, 1942-1960 Da Cegueira dos Pintores, Parte Escrita II, 1981-1983 Temas e Variações, Parte Escrita III, 1968-2013 O Artista Fala… Conversas com Sara Antónia Matos e Pedro Faro Incandescência Edição e Utopia Rui Chafes, Sob a Pele… Conversas com Sara Antónia Matos Júlio Pomar e Rui Chafes: Desenhar