Observer in orbit
Sonia Salzstein - 2002
Above all else, this group of recent canvases by Antonio Manuel reveals the compelling presence and critical vigor of Brazilian Constructivism in the world of contemporary painting. Painting has been the artist’s central concern since the Nineties, and the works on view consolidate the implacable re-examination to which he has been submitting the constructive question since then. But this falls short of defining the new harvest of works. They make up a show which points to enticing paths not only within Antonio’s work but also within the debate on painting itself at a time in which a limited range of artistic production anywhere is dedicated to it.
The biography of this Carioca artist reflects a trajectory rooted in Neoconcretism and in the sort of optimistic, creative iconoclasm incurred by Tropicalismo in the artistic environment of the Sixties, a demand for constructive frankness that stresses less its results than the work’s operation and process, as well as a fondness for improvisation, for jest, for the possibility of suddenly reverting the course of things and last-minute additions of new elements to the process. But the topicality of the artist’s painting does not derive from the historical pedigree that the constructive tradition might offer it; on the contrary, it comes from his insubordinate, anti-programmatic relationship to it, from the fact that he invests it “from within”, free to disassemble and test its limits, taking it almost to the brink of dissolution.
If, at first sight, the canvases that Antonio Manuel currently presents appear subordinated to strictly disciplined planes of straightforward color and two-dimensional rigor, their sober surfaces soon reveal a free, energetic transit of forms, a sly, patiently cultivated improvisation and scrupulous attention that captures luminous chance, putting a constantly surprising and unforeseen spin on the general order of formal articulations. An order which, incidentally, is not perceived by the artist under the idealistic lens of constructive purity of form or of a regenerative rationality supposedly inherent to them, but as a series of boundaries, gaps, and compartments with which he must deal in a sort of trial and error saga that characterizes the making of the works (“errors” which, it must be said, are perfectly received and potentialized by the works).
The construction of space in Antonio Manuel’s latest canvases thus occurs one step at a time, like an endless mosaic in which the insertion of each piece does not assign (contrary to what might be supposed) the filling-in of a known place, but the conquest of a position. In these paintings, each form and plane demarcates a place diligently and meticulously established, further supported by the sharp dynamics of the broader relationships that connect the entire surface. Hence the kinetic impression or sense of aerial mobility in many of these paintings. Constantly struggling to determine the place best suited to them, the planes spill over edges, pushing up against one another, unleashing reserves of strength. Since the procedure of organizing the surface into two areas is occasionally recurrent, one area somehow mirroring or reverberating the other, this group of works, moreover, curiously suggests an idea of curved space, as if presupposing an observer in orbit, exempt from gravity and capable even of moving through them.
Thus, although we are undoubtedly in the presence of painting’s optical realm, there is a full experience of the body within each one of the works, or at least something resembling the itinerary of a body’s attempts to situate or position itself strategically before unstable and coercive situations. In this context, the forms reveal themselves to the observer as inaccessible banners in a sort of hieratic medieval miniature or suggest an immersion in diffuse, purely atmospheric depths or even invite us to slink along narrow passages and “windows” concealed beneath the surface. In these paintings color likewise favors a synergy between optical and bodily perceptions – it may compel an irresistible accommodation within dense, warm gray and red surfaces, an annihilation in the pearly coolness of fluorescent lights, a compression in the intensely magnetic yet exiguous ducts of proteinic reds, whites and yellows.
In comparison with Antonio Manuel’s previous paintings, it must be said that these works reveal a new mural scale; although their dimensions are not quite monumental, they flaunt enough of a public countenance to dispel any doubt that they allude to the planned spaces and frames to which we are permanently subjected in contemporary city spaces.
Translated by Stephen Berg
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
Sonia Salzstein - 2002
Above all else, this group of recent canvases by Antonio Manuel reveals the compelling presence and critical vigor of Brazilian Constructivism in the world of contemporary painting. Painting has been the artist’s central concern since the Nineties, and the works on view consolidate the implacable re-examination to which he has been submitting the constructive question since then. But this falls short of defining the new harvest of works. They make up a show which points to enticing paths not only within Antonio’s work but also within the debate on painting itself at a time in which a limited range of artistic production anywhere is dedicated to it.
The biography of this Carioca artist reflects a trajectory rooted in Neoconcretism and in the sort of optimistic, creative iconoclasm incurred by Tropicalismo in the artistic environment of the Sixties, a demand for constructive frankness that stresses less its results than the work’s operation and process, as well as a fondness for improvisation, for jest, for the possibility of suddenly reverting the course of things and last-minute additions of new elements to the process. But the topicality of the artist’s painting does not derive from the historical pedigree that the constructive tradition might offer it; on the contrary, it comes from his insubordinate, anti-programmatic relationship to it, from the fact that he invests it “from within”, free to disassemble and test its limits, taking it almost to the brink of dissolution.
If, at first sight, the canvases that Antonio Manuel currently presents appear subordinated to strictly disciplined planes of straightforward color and two-dimensional rigor, their sober surfaces soon reveal a free, energetic transit of forms, a sly, patiently cultivated improvisation and scrupulous attention that captures luminous chance, putting a constantly surprising and unforeseen spin on the general order of formal articulations. An order which, incidentally, is not perceived by the artist under the idealistic lens of constructive purity of form or of a regenerative rationality supposedly inherent to them, but as a series of boundaries, gaps, and compartments with which he must deal in a sort of trial and error saga that characterizes the making of the works (“errors” which, it must be said, are perfectly received and potentialized by the works).
The construction of space in Antonio Manuel’s latest canvases thus occurs one step at a time, like an endless mosaic in which the insertion of each piece does not assign (contrary to what might be supposed) the filling-in of a known place, but the conquest of a position. In these paintings, each form and plane demarcates a place diligently and meticulously established, further supported by the sharp dynamics of the broader relationships that connect the entire surface. Hence the kinetic impression or sense of aerial mobility in many of these paintings. Constantly struggling to determine the place best suited to them, the planes spill over edges, pushing up against one another, unleashing reserves of strength. Since the procedure of organizing the surface into two areas is occasionally recurrent, one area somehow mirroring or reverberating the other, this group of works, moreover, curiously suggests an idea of curved space, as if presupposing an observer in orbit, exempt from gravity and capable even of moving through them.
Thus, although we are undoubtedly in the presence of painting’s optical realm, there is a full experience of the body within each one of the works, or at least something resembling the itinerary of a body’s attempts to situate or position itself strategically before unstable and coercive situations. In this context, the forms reveal themselves to the observer as inaccessible banners in a sort of hieratic medieval miniature or suggest an immersion in diffuse, purely atmospheric depths or even invite us to slink along narrow passages and “windows” concealed beneath the surface. In these paintings color likewise favors a synergy between optical and bodily perceptions – it may compel an irresistible accommodation within dense, warm gray and red surfaces, an annihilation in the pearly coolness of fluorescent lights, a compression in the intensely magnetic yet exiguous ducts of proteinic reds, whites and yellows.
In comparison with Antonio Manuel’s previous paintings, it must be said that these works reveal a new mural scale; although their dimensions are not quite monumental, they flaunt enough of a public countenance to dispel any doubt that they allude to the planned spaces and frames to which we are permanently subjected in contemporary city spaces.
Translated by Stephen Berg
Click here to download the DOC archive with the full text
