Marcos Campos

DECOMPOSITIONS

Eduardo Garcia's painting reveals its own making at once: three surfaces whose specific materials, brought together, create an expressive state. The support is always a textile that exceeds its function as a mere fixing field, since its own texture is part of the language (Eduardo is a specialist in fabrics). The next stage is the intervention of texturising paste on the fabric, which may be stretched over a conventional stretcher or glued onto wood. This last procedure is a recent experiment of the artist's, giving better control over an application that is in fact the creation of the body of the painting. In this second stage the indications of movement appear, of an unstable and active plasticity. Certain reserves, "windows", are produced so that the texturised field of the pre-pictorial paste-body holds the testimony of the base fabric. The final intervention comes when the liquid, fluid pigment runs over everything that precedes it in a thin film, which is not colour exactly, but a lightly transparent patina. The essence of his life as a surfer reaches beyond merely exhausted images. The intimate record, if only for an instant, in water. And it is water, queen of metamorphoses, that lies at the heart of his poetics, emerging beyond the liquefied, in its subtlest state: pure gas. Eduardo holds his waves with the hands of a skilled tamer, to deliver them alive, drenched in beauty.

Marcos Campos. Professor of Art History at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.