Reynaldo Roels

SUPPORTS

The painting is made in such a way that the artist's control is slight, and much of the result depends on factors close to the aleatory: somewhat in the manner of monotype, where a good part of the attraction comes precisely from what escapes the artist's will, paint, bitumen and other less conventional materials adhere to the fabric without the effect being fully calculable, and the canvases so printed, separated from their "matrices" (which are nothing other than the studio floor itself), present little more than the marks of that manoeuvre. Near-monochrome prevails, and the resulting "patterning", the horizontals of the floorboards, equally repetitive, sharpens the quasi-modular character that each canvas establishes. The hang, compact, emphasises the suggestion of serial work, and presenting the set of "matrices" together with the paintings has the effect of a near-installation in which the only problem is the process of its execution, mixing chance (the printing) and the deliberate (the seriation). That process finds support in other situations where artistic will is submitted to one of the riskiest tests: the partial renunciation of manual control without the work losing its conceptual control (Michaux's eyes-closed drawings come to mind at once, as does Pollock's dripping, or, closer to us, Marco Veloso's left-handed drawings). The abrupt aspect of each work, echoed across the whole, also recalls the brutality, however refined, with which Tapiès works his images. These are properly processual works, in which the viewer is obliged to explore a pictorial "stratigraphy" more important than the finished product, in which the gesture takes precedence over the mark it leaves, in which the history of the work overrides the image finally formed in it, and in which even the method of presentation must prove consistent with the premises adopted, privileging the "exhibition-situation" that arises from the "painting-situation" rather than the individual work in a show (the eternal fate of the "picture"...). Hence the need to reduce to a minimum whatever attraction they might exert on their own account, and to emphasise that they are the result of an effort, a struggle waged not only between the artist and the work but within the work itself, and equally in the very act of the viewer encountering it. Less works to be contemplated than an occurrence to be undergone.

Reynaldo Roels (late professor at EAV-RJ, curator of MAM-RJ)