by Agnaldo Farias

(translated from Portuguese by Richard Costa)

As printed on the book "Dark Matter", Barléu Editions, 2019.



“This painting was mine for 37 years, I know it perfectly well, though I cannot say completely; it provided moral support to me in the most critical moments of my adventure as an artist; I took my faith and perseverance from it.”



During my first visit to the studio of Manoel Veiga, in the last days of summer in 1997, in a torrid little apartment in Jaboatão dos Guararapes, greater Recife area, built little before he had liberated himself from his promising career as an automation engineer for a big French chemical industry company, swapping it for the more traditional chemistry of expensive and imported paint tubes, I noted, hanging in a corner, away from the vigorous portraits of Expressionist extraction, inspired by his teacher and close friend, Gil Vicente, three or four copies of classical paintings, made previously; works by Caravaggio, Velázquez, Rembrandt, and other artists. Meticulous studies in honour of three of the greatest masters of Realism and chiaroscuro, particularly the Italian one, the revolutionary whom he now revisits as part of his Dark Matter series, published here. Proof of his love and gratitude for the lessons received.

At the time when he made these exercises, Veiga knew little of the museums in Paris and London, as well as Venice, Florence, and Rome, and certainly not with the analytical regard of an artist who is intrigued by the problems raised by every great artist, and by the way they tried to solve them. Pondering this fact, I marvelled at the quality of these studies, the arrangements of certain tonal passages, the calculated use of varnish, among other subtleties that he divined and imagined more than he actually saw in the poor reproductions he took for models. In Brazil, until little before the advent of the internet and less expensive flight tickets, there was no other source other than to attentively examine publications such as Geniuses of Painting, an anthology of Italian origin — 96 painters in 96 issues, published weekly — which was distributed by the publisher Abril, among other publications that very poorly made up for the lack of referential works in art history, a rare resource in our museums and its collections that were often full of gaps. To reproduce in the same conditions as the old days, those who have been through this know it, was close to inventing; a common problem to those who live outside the centres where the criteria are established, and which is greatly responsible for unexpected paths, sophisticated productions.

For those who preferred not to wallow in lamentations, the best way out was to transform our deficiencies into virtue, as Oswald de Andrade expressed in his phrase, “the millionaire-contribution of all the errors,” a thought that prolonged itself in Hélio Oiticica’s aphorism, “From adversity we live.”

As a young painter, what — I thought as I looked at his private museum — did Manoel Veiga reproduce but the objects of his fascination? Attempting to understand the brushwork, the particular mode of presenting a Biblical scene, a portrait or a self-portrait, he transported himself into the scene. Isn’t that what happens when we involve ourselves with a work of art? Isn’t it in the most absorbed fruition that the territory of art reveals itself to be a powerful magnet, effectively palpable? Let us recall Julio Cortázar, right in the first lines of Continuity of the Parks, describing the ambiguous protagonist, a reader: “He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him.”

Very well, in the case of Caravaggio, the artist to whom Veiga returns now once again, the duplicated painting was Flagellation of Christ, a vertical canvas with the protagonist at the centre, tied to a circular column, his body hanging to our right, the head tilted over the shoulder, sided by three men who flog him. The column brings with it, from high above, a narrow and conical beam of light, which descends by bathing the body of Christ, highlighting the volumes of muscles, exalting itself in the whiteness of the fabric wrapped around his waist, which serves to interrupt the vertical reading in favor of a horizontal vector that is subtly truncated. The triangular composition makes a counterpoint with the central light: the men to the right and left receive it downgraded, a weak luminosity heralding the darkness that reigns around the disgraceful situation, leading the eye to examine it, seeking to reveal what is concealed under it. The world does not allow itself to be seen in its totality, but instead in fractions. The most important one? Probably in what refers to bring out the importance of the scene, on the other hand, the darkness signals the existence of others and enigmatic happenings.

Caravaggio took chiaroscuro to its paroxysm, the way he approached this binomial made it so that the light became known as the producer of space: darken a space completely so it is converted into something infinite. Illuminate it intensely, and the same will happen. It’s the proof that things do not coincide with the portion of the space they occupy, but instead expand themselves or retract themselves in the reason by which they are more or less illuminated. And the transit of the eye from light to dark takes place in the rhythm and direction of the flow of light projected by the painter.

This introduction to the series dedicated to Caravaggio may lead to the conclusion that Manoel Veiga’s training as an artist is exclusively in tribute to the History of Art, with a special place given to the Italian inventor, his canon more retreated in time, but the paths of creation are unpredictable. The very title in the series, Dark Matter, takes the knowledge and passion of the artist through the territory of Physics, in particular through the new discoveries in the fields of astronomy and the observation of space through telescopes, among other means of capture. Veiga, it is necessary to clarify, was a distinguished student of Electronic Engineering at the Federal University of Pernambuco, as well as a scholarship holder from the Department of Physics at the same university, having been invited to follow a postgraduate course in that field.

This relationship with Physics became closer, since, having abandoned the representation, the production of the portraits mentioned at the beginning of this essay, his painting, close to the late 1990s, ventured into the construction of “landscapes”, stains of colour produced through the catalysis of microscopic elements. This construction consists of a process that implicates precipitating the separation of an amalgam of different pigments, different in colour, and, therefore, in their chemical composition, through a systematic and controlled pulverisation of water, the utmost solvent of acrylic paint. The spraying of water over the mass of paint makes it so that it dissolves itself in conflicting speeds, according to the particularities of each pigment, its weight, its greater or lesser diffusibility.

Let us listen to the artist:

“The paintings are made on the floor... The process begins with the preparation of a careful mixture of several colours... a unique and very fluid mixture and that has, initially, only one complex colour... I attack the canvas, following that, with a brush that barely touches it... I attend the drying of paint, interfering in certain moments, ... only pulverising water from a distance, with the purpose of creating gradients of concentration that will be responsible for dislocating the pigments... the lighter pigments are more easily dragged by the force of diffusion and become separated from the heavier ones.”

The language employed in this excerpt, the safe knowledge of notions extracted from the field of Fluid Mechanics, shows just how much the physicist/engineer informs the artist, enabling him to draw upon elementary physical phenomena as tools for the construction of paintings. Without metaphorical traces, that is, without the production of images of objects or landscapes, Manoel Veiga’s paintings allow us to see microscopic implosions, minuscule and real.

Overtaking this scale into the lesser, where the laws of quantum mechanics are valid, the objects are so light that the incidence of a ray of light, even if it is feeble, can provoke alterations; movements, clashes, progressions, which have nothing to do with that which we witness in everyday life, among the things that surround us.

Proceeding with the discussion of the proximity of the artist with science and moving beyond the sphere of scales, the photographic series Hubble, before Dark Matter, is one of the most interesting examples. Hubble, as you must have noticed, is named after the telescope which has been orbiting over our planet for decades, where, free from the impurities of atmosphere, “sees” outer space with greater clarity than the near-totality of others set upon the ground. “To see” is just an expression, as Hubble apprehends light better, especially the infrared light that stars, among other celestial bodies located in space, irradiate through waves of 3 to 180 micrometres (1 micrometre corresponds to 1 millionth of a metre) and which, not only invisible to our eyes, is also blocked by the Earth’s atmosphere. The artist, making use of a computer, appropriates some images produced by Hubble, available on the NASA website, and reconfigures them. One could say that he proceeds in a way that is similar to the telescope, though the images produced belong to impossible spaces, created by him, which have little or nothing to do with the space of the real world from which they are sprung, which are captured by the machine. On the other hand, one could say that both the images captured by the telescope and the ones produced by him are, when all is said and done, representations, having the plasticity that is inherent to languages.

Dark Matter

Even a careless reader, little aware of the discoveries of science, in their sporadic readings should have stumbled upon the term “dark matter,” related to another, more famous, albeit equally enigmatic term: black hole. Very well, recent discoveries estimate that dark matter, because it does not interact with light and cannot see it directly, occupies about 85% of the matter that makes up our universe. Its presence is indicated indirectly, by the gravitational effect that it causes in the visible portion, starting with the deformation of trajectories in the irradiated light of stars.

Research on this and other similar phenomena confirm the formulations that occurred in artistic production in the 20th century, starting with painters such as Paul Cézanne and Alberto Giacometti on the relationships that bodies establish between themselves, putting in question the problematic limits of the notion of emptiness, pointing out that the space between things should not be taken as nonexistent. It is a vast theme that is not pertinent to develop here, but, in the attempt of specifying the implications contained in the series Dark Matter, it is worth remembering the notorious sculpture of Giacometti, the point of inflection of his trajectory, his goodbye to Surrealism, Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object), from 1934. A bronze sculpture, a stylised feminine figure leaning on a kind of chair with a high headrest, with its calves resting on a flat sheet, and the hands positioned as if in offering, but which, strictly speaking, are not holding anything, or, otherwise, hold the void from the title. The void is the centre of this work of art, its paradoxical presence; its absence; it magnetizes the eye, which does not let go of the area limited by the hands, a palpitating zone.

Animated by such questions, Manoel Veiga returned to Caravaggio, one of his first obsessions, thinking of the role that the dark — the shadows, the darkness — plays in his paintings. For this purpose, he selected a large set of canvases, available in high definition files on certain specialized websites, and, similarly to the translations that powerful electronic telescopes make of images gathered from outer space, he set to work on them.

Before we proceed, let us remember the poetical formulation of Werner Heisenberg, right in the introduction of The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory: “Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language.” That said, let us consider the distances traversed by the telescope and by the artist, both translating that which they capture. The machine advances through infinite space to capture events, for instance, the light irradiated by a certain star, which departed from it dozens, hundreds, thousands of light-years away. The artist pores over images created over three hundred years ago. Both deal with space and time, light and matter.

The first procedure of Manoel Veiga consists of removing all colour from canvases, leaving them in black and white, a duality that is coherent with Caravaggio’s system, the exaltation of the relationship between light and shadow. Next, with the electronic brush set in disposition by the software used, he takes care to “erase,” that is to say, to slather in deep black, all the selected paintings, so that all that remains are the fabrics that compose them. From full garments to partial clothing, from outfits to rags, respecting the gamut of draperies for each — smooth, spread, draped, bundled, tied, twisted, winding, etc —, Veiga left all the fabrics with which the characters in the canvases were dressed, or which acted as defining the scenography of environments.

The result reveals the peculiar way in which Caravaggio managed to infuse movement into his paintings, creating volutes, serpentine movements, undulating, planes that flutter from one corner of the canvas to the other, in varying directions, from high above to below, from one side to the other, with syncopated breaks in direction, continuous progressions similar to glissandos, with variations of light from the clearest white to the grey losing itself in dense darkness.

The swelling of clothing alludes to invisible bodies, like the skins that some species of animals shed from time to time. The familiarity with scenic resources invented by Caravaggio and disseminated by a legion of epigones, more or less successful, and which extends itself until today, provokes an ambiguous sensation, once we know and do not know that which we see. An amplified ambiguity when we know that everything is born from photographs extracted from paintings, manipulated so that later they can be printed with an ink jet equipment of the latest generation, on, final surprise, the same kind of fabric that Caravaggio employed in his paintings. Finally, a set of overlays that says a lot about the complexity of space-time experiences lived in our times, and about the artist’s way of acting within it.