Até à pintura Contemporânea 3 | 2016-06-08

2016-06-08

Inclassificáveis? Idiossincráticos? Identidades múltiplas?

Obras de Picasso | Obras de Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter (1932)

Since the early 1960s [Gerhard Richter] has tirelessly explored the medium of painting at a time when many were heralding its death. He has produced a remarkably varied body of work, including photography-based portraiture, landscape and still-life paintings; gestural and monochrome abstractions; and colour chart grid paintings. http://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/gerhard-richters-4900-colours-version-ii

[Richter studied painting from 1951 to 1956 in Dresden] and continued living there until he moved to West Germany in 1961 to resume his studies at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf until 1963. […] In the early 1960s Richter was exposed to both American and British Pop art, which was just becoming known in Europe, and to the Fluxus movement. […] He set into motion a systematic exploration of his chosen medium in 1962, when he began to paint enlarged copies of black-and-white photographs using only a range of greys. […] All vestiges of subject-matter seem to have been abandoned by Richter in the [abstract] paintings that he began to produce in 1976 […]. Concurrently he also painted conventional-looking landscapes that were self-evidently photographic in origin. […] Oblivious to usual strictures of linear development, he left open the possibility of adopting whatever idiom best suited his purpose. http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=4907

Gerhard Richter, Mural, 1956, (destruído)

Gerhard Richter, Table, 1962, oil on canvas, 90 x 113 cm (obra nº 1 do catalogue raisonée)
Richter, Maquette for Table, 1962, magazine clippings and annotations, 48 x 30 cm
“Table was not the first photo-based painting [Richter] painted – nor was it even the first in which the superimposition of Art Informel gesture over realist subject appears. […] Nevertheless ,Table was the first painting in which the opposition or layering of incompatible styles […] became something tense but whole”. Robert Storr (Storr, Robert – Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 29)

Gerhard Richter e Konrad Lueg, Living with Pop - a Demonstration for Capitalist Realism, 1963
Capitalist Realism was launched in 1963 in Germany by the artists Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Konrad Lueg (later to become the dealer Konrad Fischer) […]. Its most iconic expression was a performance titled “Living with Pop – A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism,” orchestrated by Richter and Lueg in the Berges department store in Dusseldorf that same year. […] Puzzled visitors arrived to find the artists making themselves at home in a staged and decidedly average living room […]; the artists were parodying the overnight ascendance of Pop Art, with its celebrity culture and embrace of everyday commodities, as well as the German craze for all things American. Against the backdrop of the Cold War and a divided Germany, the fake movement’s title also alluded to the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism. https://www.artsy.net/gene/capitalist-realism
As the evening went on, the artists offered salesman like tours of a show that wrapped art, politics and middle-class life into one prickly package and included some paintings that are now famous, like [Richter’s] “Stag”. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/arts/design/living-with-pop-capitalist-realism-at-artists-space.html?_r=0  

Gerhard Richter, Atlas
In 1964 Gerhard Richter began amassing onto panels photographs he had collected over the previous few years--sometimes as potential sources for his paintings and sometimes on their own account. […] Atlas is not quite as homogeneous as its first panels seemed to predict. While they contain mostly amateur snapshots together with reproductions from newspapers and popular magazines, these categories were rapidly expanded to include portraits, pornographic imagery, and pictures of famous historical figures and events […] More recently, large sequences of almost serially produced landscapes, travel vistas, and still lifes have been incorporated […] Atlas is not an archive: there is neither a coherent and systematic compilation of an identifiable body of material nor an archaeological exhaustion of a specific subject. In retaining a hybrid identity, Atlas loosely adheres to some of the preoccupations informing Richter's paintings without being exclusively governed by them. Most of its recent components are photographs taken by the artist himself rather than images culled from published sources. http://www.diaart.org/exhibitions/introduction/54

Gerhard Richter, Atlas, Panel 14 (fragmento) , 1964-67, black and white clippings and photographs, 67 x 52 cm
Gerhard Richter, Toilet Paper, 1965, óleo sobre tela, 70 x 65 cm

“I was surprised by photography, which we all use so massively every day. Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. That’s why I wanted to have it, to show it – not to use it as a means to painting but to use painting as a means to photography”. Gerhard Richter, 1972 (In: Richter, Gerhard – The Daily Practice of Painting, p. 72-73)

Gerhard Richter, High Diver, 1965, oil on canvas, 190 x 110 cm
Photography as readymade
“Although Richter’s photo-paintings engage with the idea of the readymade, they do not simply present found photographs as works of art. Rather, each of the three components – the concept of the readymade, the iconography of photography, and the practice of painting – are drawn together in a complex whole whose internal relations remain in a state of productive tension that is never fully resolved”. Jason Gaiger (Gaiger, Jason – “Post-conceptual painting: Gerhard Richter’s extended leave-taking”. In: A.A.V.V. – Themes in Contemporary Art. London: The Open University; Yale University Press, 2004, p. 112)

Gerhard Richter, Bombers, 1963, oil on canvas, 130 x 180 cm
Gerhard Richter, Uncle Rudi, 1965, oil on canvas, 87 x 50 cm

Confrontar o passado histórico; o passado pessoal…

“…I made a few remarks that have circulated, things like: ‘I don’t believe in anything’; ‘I don’t care about anything’; and ‘the motifs in may paintings have no meaning whatsoever […]’. I made these statements in order to provoke and in order not to have to say what I might have been thinking at that point, not to pour my heart out”. Gerhard Richter (In: Storr, Robert – Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 288)

Gerhard Richter, Aunt Marianne, 1965, oil on canvas
Gerhard Richter, Mr Heyde, 1965, oil on canvas
Confrontar o passado historic, o passado pessoal…

Uncle Rudy, “The nazi in the family”. Aunt Marianne, committed to a mental institution from  the age of 18… she died during the time of the war – killed by Nazi doctors who organized a large scale system of “euthanasia”… Dr. Heyde  established a program for the extermination of the medically undesirable… he was exposed in 1959…
https://books.google.pt/books?id=IRlAUUL3GLAC&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41&dq=Gerhard+Richter,+Mr+Heyde&source=bl&ots=GT32fwSk0b&sig=6w30bzz741b5u84JTbGJoUkVhMg&hl=pt-PT&ei=IcoQTPPvNuec4AaSyeXiBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result#v=onepage&q=Gerhard%20Richter%2C%20Mr%20Heyde&f=false

Warhol, Most Wanted Man nr.11, 1963, silkscreen on canvas

Gerhard Richter, Eight Student Nurses (detail), 1966, oil on canvas, 8 paintings, each 95 x 70 cm
Gerhard  Richter, Atlas, Panel 8, 1962-66, black and white and clippings, 52 x 67 cm

Individual portraits of the victims of American serial killer Richard Speck.

“I would rather paint the victims than the killers. When Warhol painted the killers [‘Most Wanted Men’], I painted the victims”. Gerhard Richter

Pop?
Andy Warhol, Jackie, 1964
Gerhard Richter, Woman with Umbrella, 1964, oil on canvas, 160 x 95 cm
Roy Lichtenstein, Blam, 1962, oil on canvas, 173 x 203 cm

Gerhard Richter, Bombers, 1963, oil on canvas, 130 x 180 cm

Roy Lichtenstein, White Brushstroke I, 1965, oil and magna on canvas, 122 x 142 cm
Gerhard Richter, Detail (Brown), 1970, oil on canvas, 135 x 150 cm

Gerhard Richter, Ema (Nude on a Staircase), 1966, oil on canvas, 200 x 130 cm

Gerhard Richter, 48 retratos, 1971-72, óleo sobre tela, cada 70 x 55 cm
Gerhard Richter, 48 Portraits (detail: Albert Einstein, 1870-1955), 1971-72
Gerhard Richter, Atlas, Panel 31, 1971

Richter, Cityscape F, 1968, oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm

Gerhard Richter, Untitled (Grey), 1968, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm
Gerhard Richter, Grey, 1974, oil on canvas, 140 x 140 cm
“I was out of fashion for a long time after de early 1960s work, and painting itself was unfashionable too…
…At the end of the 1960s the art scene underwent great politicization. Painting was taboo, because it had no ‘social relevance’ and was therefore a bourgeois thing”. Gerhard Richter

[Grey] makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible or invisible. […] To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. Gerhard Richter, 1975 (In: Richter, Gerhard – The Daily Practice of Painting, p. 82 – 83)
“It was the ultimate statement of powerlessness and desperation. Nothing, absolutely nothing left, no figures, no color, nothing. Then you realize after you painted three of them that one is better than the others and you ask yourself why that is. When I see eight pictures together I no longer feel that they are sad…” Gerhard Richter (In: Coosje van Bruggen, “Painting as a Moral Act”)

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Picture , 1976, oil on canvas, 65 x 60,5 cm
Gerhard Richter, Abstract Picture , 1977, oil on canvas, 225 x 200,5 cm
Gerhard Richter, Detail (Brown), 1970, oil on canvas, 135 x 150 cm

“After the grey paintings, after the dogma of ‘fundamental painting’, whose purist and moralizing aspects fascinated me to a degree bordering on self-denial, all I could do was start over again. This was the beginning of the first color sketches”. Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter, Veneza (escada), 1985, óleo sobre tela, 50 x 70 cm

Gerhard Richter, Troisdorf, 1985, oil on canvas, 85 x 120 cm

Gerhard Richter, Seascape, 1998, oil on canvas, 290 x 290 cm
“A quiet act of defiance”. Robert Storr (Storr, Robert – Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002)
“Just because landscape is beautiful, it’s probably the most terrific thing there is… I felt like painting something beautiful.
…A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted”. Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter, Ten Colours, 1966, enamel on canvas,135 cm x 120 cm
“[Gerhard Richter] began his investigations into the complex permutations of color charts in 1966, with a small painting entitled 10 Colors. That work was produced in reaction to Pop art, in particular the paintings of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who enthusiastically adopted commercial techniques and subject matter drawn from consumer culture. The subsequent series of paintings was based on the color charts that are shown to customers by paint suppliers to help them choose the colors they want for their home. Richter transformed the handy-sized, industrially manufactured paint swatches into huge tableaux as a way of exploring the potentials and limits of painting, linking his work with the concerns of Conceptual art and Minimalism”. http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/92487.html

Richter e assistente a trabalhar numa pintura Color Chart, 1973
Sol Le Witt, Four Basic Colours: Yellow, Black, Red, Blue and their combinations, 1971, print, 20 x 25,4 cm
Gerhard Richter, 180 colors, 1971,enamel paint on canvas, 200 x 200 cm

Gerhard Richter, 4900 colours, detail, 2007, 49 panels, 97x97cm, enamel paint on Aludibond
Gerhard Richter, 4900 Colours, Serpentine Gallery, 2008, installation view

Gerhard Richter, Man Shot Down 1, 1988, oil on canvas, 100 x 140
Gerhard Richter, Record Player, 1988, oil on canvas, 62 x 83 cm

Gerhard Richter, Youth Portrait, 1988, oil on canvas, 67 x 62 cm
Richter, Gerhard, Morta, 1988, óleo sobre tela, 62 x 67 cm
The fifteen paintings that compose October 18, 1977 are based on photographs of moments in the lives and deaths of four members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a German left-wing terrorist group that perpetrated a number of kidnappings and killings throughout the 1970s. […] On this date the bodies of three principal RAF members were found in the cells of the German prison where they were incarcerated. Although the deaths were officially deemed suicides, there was widespread suspicion that the prisoners had been murdered by the German state police. Richter based his paintings on newspaper and police photographs; his reworking of these documentary sources is dark, blurred, and diffuse. http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79037

Gerhard Richter, Betty , 1988, óleo sobre tela, 102 x 72 cm
Gerhard Richter, Auto-retrato, 1996, óleo sobre tela, 51,1 x 46,4 cm

Gerhard Richter, S. with Child, 1995, oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm
Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting, 2004, oil on canvas, 63 x 52,5 cm

Sigmar Polke (1941-2010)

Born in the eastern part of Germany at the time, now Olesnica, Poland, “Sigmar Polke has constantly defied aesthetic boundaries in his work, extending the visual vocabularies of painting, photography, and printmaking through a mercurial working process. His investigations into the effects that can be achieved by embracing a vast range of materials, pictorial sources, and art practices have been highly influential to successive generations of artists. Within his wealth of material can also be found mystery—he is frequently called enigmatic, elliptical, obscure”. http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artists/sigmar-polke/artworks?p=3&gclid=CKSxnPCA6sUCFQTLtAodOHEAwg

Sigmar Polke, Wardrobe, 1963, lacquer on canvas, 50 x 58 cm

Polke, Plastik-Wannen, 1964, oil no canvas, 94 x 120 cm

Sigmar Polke, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, 1965, acrylic on canvas, 35,0 x 42,5 cm

Sigmar Polke, Girlfriends, 1965, oil on canvas, 150 x 190 cm
 [Polke’s] “dot paintings,” or Rasterbilder, produced between 1963 and 1969, were hand-painted renditions of mechanically generated images (mainly found photographs), and were both a parody of and commentary on the slickness of mechanical reproduction appearing in American Pop. http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artists/sigmar-polke/artworks?p=3&gclid=COCLlaW81cUCFTLLtAodrhUAbA

Sigmar Polke, Arch, 1965, oil on fabric, 180 x 150 cm
In 1964 Polke began using commercial fabrics for his paintings. […] He bought colorful decorator fabrics at markets and in department stores and piled them in huge mounds in his studio as possible future supports for paintings. http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2014/polke/chronology

Sigmar  Polke, Two Palm Trees, 1964, artificial resin on fabric, 90 x 75 cm

Over the years […] Polke represented himself in artworks variously as a palm tree, a doppelganger, and an astronaut… http://www.michaelwerner.com/artist/sigmar-polke/news-item/3217 

Sigmar Polke, Reiherbild II (Heron Painting II), 1968, Dispersion on flanel, 190 x 150 cm
“I stood in front of the canvas and wanted to paint a bunch of flowers. Then I received a command from higher beings: Not a bunch of Flowers! Paint flamingos! At first I wanted to go on painting, but then I realised that they meant it seriously”. Sigmar Polke, c. 1966

Sigmar Polke, Moderne Kunst (Modern Art), 1968, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 125 cm

Pintura abstrata?
Pintura figurativa (representação de elementos da pintura abstrata)?

Sigmar Polke, The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Right Hand Corner Black, 1969, lacquer on canvas, 150 x 125,5 cm

Sigmar Polke, Polke's Whip, 1968, photographs, rope, tape, etc., 59 x 70 cm
Sigmar Polke, Potato House, 1967, painted wooden construction, potatoes, height 240 cm
Proximidade da atividade interdisciplinar do grupo Fluxus
“Well if there is anything at all that manifests everything artists are supposed to be or have – the delight of innovation, creativity, spontaneity, productivity, creating entirely out of oneself and so on – then it is the potato”. Sigmar Polke

Polke, Affen, 1974, dispersion and spray enamel on canvas, 180 x 150 cm

Polke loved nature, as has so often been attested—the German forests, meadows, and promontories, as well as the Ticino Alps, and North African deserts—and for him nature included the toxic peyote cactus, angel’s trumpets growing in his garden, fly agaric, and drugs of indigenous cultures, in addition to synthetic products created in laboratories. […] In Polke’s works from the 1970s fluid relationships and hazy boundaries between mediums, classes, and sexes are translated visually. http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2014/polke/chronology

Sigmar  Polke, Untitled, 1973, gouache on paper, 70 x 99,5 cm
Polke, Untitled, c. 1975, gelatin silver print
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has called “Polke’s palmology,” his use of the palm tree, “which runs through all his work like a leitmotif.” http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2014/polke/chronology
In the 1970’s Polke decided to almost suppress “his role as originator or author through collaborations with artists such as Achim Duchow and, eventually to abandon painting for most of the decade. Instead, he turned to photography and its chemistry of exposure and development. He investigated film and video, frequently in collaboration with others. These activities grew out of the lifestyle he led at the time, which included experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs and casual, communal living”. Sean Rainbird (in: Sigmar Polke: Join the Dots. Tate Gallery Liverpool) 

Dr. Bonn (1978), painted on a support made of the sort of woolen fabric often used for jackets […], shows an official, named Bonn after the West German capital at the time, seated at his desk in an office. On the wall hang portraits of […] two members of the extreme left-wing terrorist organization […] Red Army Faction (RAF). […] The bureaucrat, seated in a cone of white light as if lit by a spotlight, has turned around in his chair to face the viewer while aiming a slingshot at his own head. http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2014/polke/chronology

Obras de Goya e Max Ernst
Sigmar Polke, This is How You Sit Correctly (after Goya), 1982, acrílico sobre tecido

In This Is How You Sit Correctly (After Goya) […] 1982, elements of works by Francisco de Goya and Max Ernst are superimposed on a support with areas of white and gray in the center and a colorful fabric visible along the edges. […] In this and other such layered works, which Polke created using slide projections or an opaque projector, the various images appear to penetrate each other, thrusting different elements into the foreground at each viewing. http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2014/polke/chronology

Polke, Paganini, 1982, dispersion on canvas, 200 x 450 cm
In Paganini a devil sits on a man’s bed playing a fiddle; nearby, in the center of a vortex, a fool juggles skulls that turn into radioactive-hazard symbols and then into grinning faces with swastika features. Swastikas also appear painted in white on the surface, highlighted in the geometric shapes of the ground, and rising like a swarm of flies out of the fiddle. […] The painting superimposes a punk aesthetic onto the legend of the violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini…” http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2014/polke/chronology

Sigmar Polke, Apparition I, 1992, artificial resin, lacquer on fabric
Some of Polke’s abstract paintings “are made with fugitive organic colour such as essence of violet; some with mineral powders of unusual origin […]; and some with unstable and environmentally sensitive pigments. Suspended in oil or in synthetic translucent binders, these pigments are brushed or spread without gesture over the canvases, few of whiich have any discernible design or focus. Rather than being composed of images, these paintings consist of areas and relative, almost always faint, accumulations of tone colour”. Robert Storr (In: Storr, Robert –  “Polke’s Mind Tatoos”, Art in America, December 1992)

Sigmar Polke, Knight, 1994, artificial resin, lacquer on fabric, 300 x 225 cm

Polke, Untitled (Triptych), 2002, polyester resin and acrylic paint on fabric, 3 panels 400 x 300 cm each

Sigmar Polke, Bienal de Veneza 2007

Luc Tuymans (1958)

Belgian painter. He studied painting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, Brussels (1979–80) and the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp (1980–82). He abandoned painting in 1982, studying art history at the Vrije Universiteit, Brussels (1982–6), and spent three years experimenting with video and film. The technique of montage as well as the peculiar light of the television screen were strong influences on his subsequent paintings. […] Many of his works refer to memory traces of individual and collective trauma…

John-Paul Stonard, Oxford University Press http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=7520

A sucessão de direções temáticas liga-se à sucessão de exposições individuais…

“The titles of my shows are really relevant. If you list them you can see a sort of guiding line across my work”. Luc Tuymans (“Interview: Juan Vicente Aliaga in conversation with Luc Tuymans”. In: Tuymans, Luc – Luc Tuymans. London: Phaidon, 2003, p. 31)

Josephine n’est pas ma femme, 1988 | Campos de concentração…
“Almost all the works [in Josephine n’est pas ma femme] show pictures of spaces structuring stages of existence. They are pictures of empty rooms, of isolated things, pictures of a world that is frozen beneath the gaze, shattered, deathly still. […]
Until 1989 Tuymans’ sites of horror were devoid of people. Painting people in their suffering is impossible; the inevitable voyeurism of a gaze that cannot be returned would be unbearable”. Ulrich Loock (Loock, Ulrich – On layers of sign-relations… In: Tuymans, Luc – Luc Tuymans. London: Phaidon, 2003, p. 56, 58)

Luc Tuymans, Gas Chamber, 1986, óleo sobre tela, 50 x 70 cm
“Muitas das minhas imagens têm um sentido amável que se transforma em algo aterrorizador. A violência é a única estrutura subjacente ao meu trabalho. Câmara de Gás pode parecer uma pintura terna, mas quando lemos o título torna-se ameaçadora. […] Quis fazer uma pintura acolhedora sobre uma coisa horrenda. […] O espaço teve que ser evocado como se fosse pele, porque nesse local mataram seres humanos.
 […] Por vezes o título é mais importante do que a própria imagem”. Luc Tuymans (“Interview: Juan Vicente Aliaga in conversation with Luc Tuymans”. In: Tuymans, Luc – Luc Tuymans. London: Phaidon, 2003)

Luc Tuymans, Schwarzheide, 1986, oil on canvas, 60 x 70 cm
“In the camps there were prisoners who made drawings. Afraid of discovery, they divided the drawings into strips, and each prisoner took a strip. The survivors later met and put the strips back together”. Luc Tuymans (“Artist’s Writings: Luc Tuymans, Disenchantment, 1991”. In: Tuymans, Luc – Luc Tuymans. London: Phaidon, 2003, p. 31)

Luc Tuymans, The Servant, 1990, oil on canvas, 50,5 x 53 cm
Luc Tuymans, The Cry, 1989, oil on canvas, 37 x 45 cm
“Suspended [1990] is an exhibition of pictures showing everyday scenes […]. The figuration is no longer set on a largely undifferentiated ground; the composition is more varied; the paintings have more colour than ever before. Yet the people are as if petrified…” Ulrich Loock (Loock, Ulrich – On layers of sign-relations… In: Tuymans, Luc – Luc Tuymans. London: Phaidon, 2003, p. 58)

Luc Tuymans, Der Diagnostische Blick X, 1992, óleo s/ tela, 48 x 55 cm

Luc Tuymans, Der Diagnostische Blick VI, 1992, óleo s/ tela, 75 x 48 cm
Der diagnostische Blick (The diagnostic view), 1992 – most strongly influenced by photographic realism. The paintings in this exhibition were made from illustrations in a medical handbook.

“Estava interessado em fotografias médicas porque as pessoas retratadas são pessoas reais que acabaram por morrer. […] Queria representar a doença não de forma óbvia mas através do modo como a pintura é feita, e levar essa doença a confrontar o espectador”. Luc Tuymans (“Interview: Juan Vicente Aliaga in conversation with Luc Tuymans”. In: Tuymans, Luc – Luc Tuymans. London: Phaidon, 2003)

Luc Tuymans, The Flag, 1995, oil on canvas, 138 x 78 cm
Heimat, 1995, is Tuyman’s “first exhibition to feature a symbolic iconography, the iconography of Flemish nationalism: the Flemish flag is painted from the wall, the lion almost disappearing in the folds of the limp cloth (the flag)”. Ulrich Loock (Loock, Ulrich – On layers of sign-relations… In: Tuymans, Luc – Luc Tuymans. London: Phaidon, 2003, p. 87)
“I painted it [the flag] in such a way that the colours are denied and it looks like a pile of white dust, hanging on the wall – not waving in the sky. The whole thing was about emphasizing the hollowness of their symbols”. Luc Tuymans (“Interview: Juan Vicente Aliaga in conversation with Luc Tuymans”. In: Tuymans, Luc – Luc Tuymans. London: Phaidon, 2003, p. 31)

Luc Tuymans, Lumumba, 2000, óleo sobre tela, 62 x 46 cm

Mwana Kitolo (Beautiful White Man), 2001, Pavilhão da Bélgica, Bienal de Veneza, 2001 – “A group of earlier paintings by Tuymans was shown alongside recent works dealing with the aftermath of Belgian colonialism in the Congo. […] His paintings are filled […] with an iconography of wretchedness and guilt”. Adrian Searle http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/jun/16/arts.highereducation  
Lumumba – Fundador do Movimento Nacional Congolês (MNC); liderou a luta contra a dominação colonial belga no Congo, dando um contribuição decisiva para a libertação do seu país do jugo imperialista europeu. Foi eleito primeiro-ministro em 1960, mas ocupou o cargo apenas por 12 semanas, pois o seu governo foi derrubado por um golpe de estado liderado por Mobutu. Ao tentar fugir para o leste do país, Lumumba seria capturado; o seu assassinato ocorreu em janeiro de 1961 e teve a conivência dos Estados Unidos e da Bélgica, que viam o líder congolês como alinhado à União Soviética. https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba

Luc Tuymans, Tsjombe, 2000, óleo sobre tela, 73 x 108 cm
Os assassinos de Lumumba surgem de forma indiferenciada, como sombras…
Supõe-se que Tshombe assistiu pessoalmente com seus ministros Kitenge, Munongo, Kibwe, e os belgas Gat e Verscheure à execução de Lumumba https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo%C3%AFse_Tshombe

Luc Tuymans, Leopoldville, 2000, oil on canvas, 55 x 84 cm
Léopoldville foi fundada em 1881; em 1966 passou a denominar-se Kinshasa; é a capital e a maior cidade da atual República Democrática do Congo

Nomadismo temático | coesão formal (?)

Luc Tuymans, Orchid, 1998, oil on canvas, 99,5 x 76,7 cm
Luc Tuymans, Petrus & Paulus, 1998, oil on canvas, 118 x 86 cm
Luc Tuymans, Pigeons, 2001, óleo sobre tela, 128 x 156 cm

Luc Tuymans, Slide # 1, 2002, óleo sobre tela, 203,5 x 134 cm

Francis Alÿs (1959)

Francis Alÿs  was born in Belgium, 1959. He lives and works in Mexico City.

Francis Alÿs's art is centered around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life. His multifaceted projects include public actions, installations, videos, paintings, and drawings; the artist himself has described his work as "a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables." Across these different media, Alÿs presents his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility towards anthropological and political concerns. http://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/francis-alys/biography/ 

Francis Alÿs, Untitled (Sign Painting Project), 1993-1997, acrylic on board, 4 paintings

Francis Alÿs, Catalogue 4 - 1, 1994, óleo sobre tela, 25 x 21 cm

Francis Alÿs, Bolero (Shoe Shine Blues), 1996-2007, Graphite, tape, and collage on vellum, 520 drawings, DVD animation, 9:40 min., etc., installation view, Venice Biennale 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQjDOsfqqLI

“Bolero (Shoe Shine Blues)” is a traditional animation, hand-drawn in 500+ frames, which are also on display. The animation consists solely of a shoe shine: hands move a length of cloth around and across a shoe, syncopated with a minimalistic melody and lyrics written by the artist. http://art.newcity.com/2008/10/06/review-francis-alysrenaissance-society/#sthash.lElpSxGG.dpuf

Pollock at work on Number 32, 1950 (foto Hans Namuth)

Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, 2004, performance, Jerusalem
Sometimes doing something poetic can become political
and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.
Jerusalem, 2004
http://francisalys.com/greenline/rima.html
“In the summer of 1995 I performed a walk with a leaking can of blue paint in the city of São Paulo. The walk was then read as a poetic gesture of sorts. In June 2004, I re-enacted that same performance with a leaking can of green paint by tracing a line following the portion of the ‘Green Line’ that runs through the municipality of Jerusalem. 58 liters of green paint were used to trace 24 km”. Francis Alys http://francisalys.com/greenline/ 
The route he followed was one drawn in green on a map as part of the armistice after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, indicating land under the control of the new state of Israel. […] what he’s really doing isn’t immediately obvious: creating a metaphor about history with his body. As he moves along, dribbling paint, he recreates a barrier that exists in physical form, as a series of concrete partitions separating Israelis and Palestinians, and as a separatist symbol, both triumphant and oppressive. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/arts/design/13chan.html?_r=0 

Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002, performance view, Lima, Peru, April 11
http://www.ubu.com/film/alys_faith.html

“Alÿs visited Lima in 2000 […] and found ‘a desperate situation that called for an «epic response», at once futile and heroic, absurd and urgent.’ He returned in 2002 to organise When Faith Moves Mountains, persuading 500 Peruvian students to walk in a line up a sand dune on the outskirts of the city, digging as they went, thus displacing the dune by a few centimeters. The action – Alÿs’s most visually spectacular to that date – was filmed from various positions and the images were subsequently used on postcards, whilst the artist also encouraged the spread of news of the work through rumour and myth. […] The miniscule and temporary movement of the dune seems to dramatise a principle of ‘Maximum Effort, Minimal Result’ that typifies many Latin American modernisation schemes, yet it was also a monumental achievement made by communal co-operation. For Alÿs it was essential that the participants gave their time and effort for free so that the action could stand as a model for a lavish expenditure of energy, running counter to conservative economic principles of efficiency and production”. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/francis-alys/francis-alys-story-deception-room-guide/francis-alys-3

Nem tudo é “pintável”!

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)

American sculptor, painter and printmaker of French birth. She studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before turning to studio arts. In 1938, after marrying Robert Goldwater, an American art historian, critic and curator, she went to New York, where she enrolled in the Art Students League and studied painting for two years. Bourgeois's work was shown at the Brooklyn Museum Print Exhibition in 1939. […] In 1949 Bourgeois had her first sculpture exhibition, including Woman in the Shape of a Shuttle, at the Peridot Gallery; this work proved typical of her wooden sculpture and foreshadowed her preoccupations of the following years. Her first sculptures were narrow wooden pieces, such as Sleeping Figure (1950; New York, MOMA), a ‘stick' figure articulated into four parts with two supporting poles. Bourgeois soon began using non-traditional media, with rough works in latex and plaster contrasting with her elegantly worked pieces in wood, bronze and marble. In the 1960s and 1970s her work became more sexually explicit. The psychological origins of her work are particularly evident in Destruction of the Father (1974; New York, Xavier Fourcade). Bourgeois's work was appreciated by a wider public in the 1970s as a result of the change in attitudes wrought by feminism and Postmodernism. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/louise-bourgeois-2351

Louise Bourgeois, The Red Rooms, installation view

Red Room (Child) and Red Room (Parents), both from 1994, comprise the only pair of Cells in the series. For Bourgeois, the eponymous red color stood for blood, violence and danger, shame, jealousy, malevolence, and guilt. The exteriors of both Red Rooms are composed of discarded doors from a courthouse in Manhattan.
Red Room (Child) houses elements associated with Bourgeois’s childhood: the red and blue spindles and needles, for instance, recall the tapestry workshop run by the Bourgeois family; a pair of child’s hands laid over those of an adult suggest a longing for security; and the two mittens bearing the embroidered words “moi” [me] and “toi” [you] reinforces this desire. Mementos, mysterious objects, spiral shapes, and everyday items combine to create an evocative composition, giving the impression of a psychological character study.
Compared to Red Room (Child), the space within Red Room (Parents) is more orderly. The bed, a place of closeness and sexuality, is flanked by two marble sculptures of naked torsos partially covered in cloth. A xylophone case and a toy train on the bed recall the presence of a child. In children’s eyes, sexuality is a mystery that is usually concealed. Between the two parents’ pillows the artist placed a third embroidered with “Je t’aime” [Ilove you], just as a child might nestle between its parents. http://bourgeois.guggenheim-bilbao.es/en/red-room-parents#209

Louise Bourgeois, Child Abuse, a project for Artforum, Dec. 1982

“Everyday you have to abandon your past or accept it and then if you cannot accept it you become a sculptor”. Louise Bourgeois

*

Composição?
Pintura?
Contemporaneidade?
…

Projeto artístico contemporâneo;
motivação pessoal;
articulação com a arte (do passado e do presente);
articulação com o contexto artístico contemporâneo;
…

Ao longo do século XX, a ideia de vanguarda esteve por diversas vezes associada ao ideal utópico de uma arte radicalmente nova e diferente, liberta das heranças de um passado caduco (!) e opressivo (?). Esse idealismo pertence à História. Hoje ninguém duvida de que tudo o que realizamos se constrói sobre algo que já existe, de que a evolução das ideias, dos modos de pensar e fazer, são processos dialéticos ininterruptos, quer se realizem de forma lenta e sequencial, quer sejam marcados por transformações súbitas. Continuidade e rutura serão sempre vias alternativas possíveis. Em qualquer caso, a contextualização histórica, a consciência dos precedentes, permanecem fatores cruciais para a validade da prática artística.

Mas para se ser artista esse conhecimento, embora necessário, é insuficiente. Ser artista exige capacidade para definir um programa de ação onde as motivações e objetivos pessoais são igualmente determinantes. Selecionar caminhos depende, em tudo, da identidade do próprio autor.

Sabemos que identidade artística e identidade pessoal estão interligadas, que a identidade pessoal é determinante na configuração da identidade artística (e vice versa) ou que ambas devem ser construídas reflexivamente. Mas sabemos também que não são coincidentes e que o diálogo que estabelecem é tudo menos linear (mesmo nos casos limite, em que parecem fundir-se, a diferenciação é essencial) …  

M.B.