Marcus de Lontra Costa

ON THE DISCOVERIES OF THE EYE

Every landscape holds a certain truth about the world. In the nineteenth century the Impressionists abandoned the truths of the academy, opened their studio doors and went out into the streets, giving themselves to the healthy practice of painting en plein air in order to rebuild the role of painting, and of art, in the world. Out of that landscape, out of that exercise in catching the fleeting instant of the world, came the foundations that would structure modernist aesthetic thought. All painting is an experience of the world. Painting is the art of permanence; it joins sensibility to reason, it reveals, it "makes visible". It enriches what we know of reality and feeds our relation to the world around us with poetic and objective information. Painting is thus a way of seeing, feeling and understanding the world, establishing a dialogue with it in which chance and construction complete one another, in which concept and practice join to build an articulate, intelligent and poetic body. Every artist is in dialogue with tradition. Eduardo Garcia does not fear the past; on the contrary, he makes of it a commitment to sensitising the eye. There is in his work a kind of romantic aura, a commitment to the creation of beauty and to revealing a world hidden in plain sight. For him the artist is a pathfinder, a discoverer, and the greater task of the craft is to strip away the veils from the eye. Painting is an instrument of sensitisation, as simple and as sophisticated as bread and wine. The whole history of painting survives in the contemporary. Through patches of colour formed by superimposed layers of paint, the artist's work reveals a sensitive and well-wrought pictorial process. Eduardo Garcia creates his own urban landscape, his maps, his walls, his Word. His subject is, in essence, Time. Before his paintings the viewer is invited into a history, a record, a process: the body of the painting is there, present, vibrating across the large surfaces that organise themselves by a kind of guiding constructive principle. Every instant is the fruit of a past. Painting is the record of history, and it is made through a rational constructive process that never abandons the poetic, nor certain values bound up with craft. In a world governed by speed and virtual images, Eduardo Garcia's painting asserts itself before our eyes as the art of permanence. And the powerful, vibrant presence of pictorial materiality is the instrument the artist uses to reach true beauty.

Marcus Lontra (creator of the exhibition "Onde está você Geração 80", curator of MAM-RJ)