by Bianca Dias
As printed on the book "Manoel Veiga", Dardo, 2017.



Bearing the paintings of Caravaggio as his starting point, Manoel Veiga dissolves the image to its threshold and grapples the density of the invisible. Eliminating colours and allowing vestments and folds to show through, he activates the void – the cosmic space between one thing and another – between the presence and the gesture of obliteration between the visible and the invisible, between the surface and depth. “Dark matter” that breaks through the curvature of fabrics, reinventing bodies and spaces, reorganising the act of seeing in an iconoclastic gesture that provokes smudging in the representation of the image, of figuration. In this living and throbbing intermission between things and vibrant spectres, there is a fine contemplation of tremor in the void.

For Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst, all modes of sublimation – whether religion, art, or science – seek the void. Between those three, Lacan designates a distinct place for art. While science excludes and religion keeps us distanced from the central void, art operates its miracles in a way that is radically different. Through its narrow affinity with the real and its closeness with the clefts where we can behold loss or the very dissolution of the image, art brings about, beyond the image, the void of the Thing. In Manoel Veiga’s fundamental gesture during the “Dark matter” series, the intent is not, therefore, the represented image, but the artwork as a signifier that sets the boundaries between the void and establishes it as language, dark matter that indicates the throbbing of the real in visible matter.

In suspension and in the field of gravity of bodies that insinuate themselves in his paintings, there is a hollowness carved into the structure, a point that guarantees the opening into the chiaroscuro, summoning us to suspend ourselves.

Through the image, light diffuses itself according to the impact of the pictorial gesture, spreading over folds – which are also an event where undulations of light are muted and attain other routes – in a singular way of rewriting the body, the distortion of the figurative that no longer exerts the function of organisation and contour of the real, but, rather, makes possible, precisely, the encounter with the real, which makes (the real) emerge, provokes it, allows a glimpse into it, something that beckons a threshold – between life and death, man and animal, madness and sanity – where being born and perishing reverberate mutually. For Witold Gombrowicz, Polish writer and playwright, it would be something akin to the unfinished state that is inherent to life, an embryonic state where form still has not revealed itself entirely, and yet, there is an irresistible attraction that preserves, in a state of levitation, the freedom of something yet to be born.

In erasing or reducing the imaginary dimension of an image, Manoel Veiga repurposes in the scene that which is yet to be born. And it is the symbol of this erasing gesture that divides the image, and also sustains it and crosses through it. If the body in Caravaggio makes form ambiguous, in the work of Manoel Veiga the writing of the body exhibits the real, dark matter. The light, in Caravaggio, endows him with the differential trace, whose distinctive morphology is light-colour. Manoel Veiga recaptures the spatial occupation of light with an oblique orientation and the movement of the chiaroscuro, pointing out the dissolution of forms and a relationship with the void.

In the Lacanian perspective, the vase is an object made to represent the existence of the void at the centre of the real. Art, Lacan points out, just as the experience of psychoanalysis, does not avoid or seek to fill the void, but instead contours and encircles the central void of things, to extract from them, precisely, an unprecedented meaning, which is unrepresentable. Artistic creation gives rise to the object over the void.

That which breaks through is a new body: a body-glimpse, which, even though silent, communicates itself with many references to light, shadows, transparencies. A body that makes of absence a sharp presence – mouth, blood, skin, faces, heart, brain, genitalia, fingers, bones, meat, eyes, nerves. It’s a radical manner of writing the body through extraction, like a poetical delirium that transgresses the idea of a Cartesian and functional body into a cosmic tragic body, dark matter.

A cosmic body, intermittent and discontinuous, contradiction and tension reinvented into dark matter. Here, it’s the erasing gesture that rescues the body, that creates an enigmatic body that only allows us to glimpse it through the throbbing of residue. The artist becomes a poet as such, and – as George Steiner, one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century, revealed, the poet creates in a dangerous likeness to the gods – dispels or builds pathways, reengineering the mystic meaning of presence, dissecting the image as an exercise of incarnation.

Through the fold and the unfathomable, Manoel Veiga operates a kind of rescue of the invisible. Dark matter makes itself present as style – a stylus that cuts and sets boundaries over a trembling space, making the clear frontier between light and shadow vanish, proposing a passage through both of them operating through the power of the unfinished, inherent to the Baroque, which allows one to connect points that are apparently distant through the sparkle of an expression.

Although I recognise an unclassifiable dimension to the work of Manoel Veiga, the memory of the Baroque is not random. Severo Sarduy, a Cuban essayist who studies the theme, signals the strength of the gesture that does not aim to obstruct light with the shadow completely, though placing them in contrast or making the passage of one towards the other indiscernible. That is where brightness comes through, the solar eclipse, in its apex, the double centre, “sun over sun”, a presence that is not a state, but rather a becoming of the presence in an immeasurable meaning.

The cosmogony that Manoel Veiga presents is an open thread that disassembles continuities, permeated by that which is unheard of and the indiscernible traces of the object, confounding internal and external, inside and outside, private and public, a kind of Holy Shroud that brings news of the track and the trail, an intermediate brightness between light and shadow, through which we perceive, as in the stars, its best image: even if they are already extinct and no longer exist, their flickering brightness still reaches us, their sparks, their survival, a text-painting that places itself in infinite folds, in infinite virtualities or readings that perpetually reflect back at us the essential questions: What is image? What is visibility? What is the image of art?

The artist operates a genuine archaeology over our ways of thinking and articulating about the visible, from tradition to the iconoclastic gesture, tensing the regard and thought, always pursuing the image of alterity and providing the possibility of each person building their own access to invisibility in that which is visible.

It’s this heterogeneousness, this foreignness and strangeness, concealed even in genealogies, that displace any fixation of identity, any reflection of an alleged “self” and open a relationship with the other, which is at play in the idea of a dark matter that is, before anything, a poetical exercise.

Going to Caravaggio to dissect “undecided and indecisive” images, rescuing invisibility from an ever-fleeting meaning: one does not share the visible without constructing the invisible place of this very act of sharing.

It’s a radical gesture similar to what the philosopher Marie-José Mondzain proposes: “To incarnate is not to imitate, nor is to reproduce or to simulate. It is to act in the absence of things.” In the material apparition of an immaterial object, of an invisibility in that which is visible, to incarnate assumes a liberating distance that allows the one who sees to not mistake that which they are given to see with that which they want to see.

If the incarnated image constitutes itself in three instances – the visible, the invisible, and the sight that connects both – to incorporate, then, is to make One. In the disposition to incarnation, Manoel Veiga, when he revisits Caravaggio, refuses all form of incorporation, since he already knows, through the way in which he constructs his work, that the device of incorporation is fusion-like. His paintings are like incarnations of an “uncertain and unrelenting freedom” and, even if he cannot erase completely the echoes and reflections of the Italian master, he makes use of a transmission that sends him back to that which is inherent to his work: his spectres in the nerves and shadows of the image, the relationship with the invisible and the courage of thinking, in the boundaries of meaning, the indeterminacy of his place as an artist that incessantly puts in question the power of the regard and the strategies of the veil (that protect invisibility and the moving aspect of the senses).

This is the highest ambivalence of dark matter and of Manoel Veiga’s artistic gesture: incarnating an “uncertain freedom” and, perhaps, an unlikely freedom, as the one portrayed in the extasis of Saint Teresa of Ávila, eternalised in the marble of Bernini, where everything seems to fluctuate, where gravity creates a new cosmic space: a glorious folly, a celestial madness.