by David Barro





“Our ancestors restored statues; we remove from them their false noses and prosthetic devices; our descendants will, in turn, no doubt do something else.”




Marguerite Yourcenar writes that the day an artwork is finished, its life, in a certain way, begins. After its first step from the block to the human form, the sculpture’s life starts with another pulse – one of admiration or contempt; one of preservation or decay. This life is a journey towards death, towards this shapeless mineral state that was operated upon and deconstructed by the sculptor – because all artwork exists in time, though not in a firm and stable manner. One should but think about the color of the many polychromatic statues that have survived through the centuries, reaching us in a different manner today. A life ends and another one is born, the result of an involuntary beauty associated with the avatars of history, and nonetheless resulting as well from certain tributes, like this one that Manoel Veiga pays to Caravaggio – designed as it was from his avowed admiration for the master’s paintings. The visual product is not far removed from this time-eaten set of those sculptures, or from this fragmented beauty of those statues that were cast down from their pedestals through iconoclastic blows. This beheaded beauty presents itself today with the volition for the abstract that brands contemporary society.

In these works, nature rushes off, becomes abysmal, even when it seems to remain. As viewers we are carried away by the image, as someone who loses himself in the depths of haiku. They are artworks that evoke future and past. Manoel Veiga in his devotion embraces the sense of loss in the same way that Georges Didi-Huberman tells us when he says that to see is to feel that something inevitably slips from our grasp; in other words, when seeing is losing. Everything is figured and disfigured. The landscape cleans the landscape, and paradoxically the scenes produced are saturated, and we are overtaken by their vertigo. They are paintings that reinforce the enigma, that are projected as an interstitial space.

Dark Matter (Matéria Escura) announces an active void, like the volumetric hollows of a sculpture by Henry Moore. The missing figures look as if they were undermined by the earthquake that tunes the image, tempers it, as if it were a piano. Here the void is a subtle membrane, an invisible presence, as is light or gravity. In other words, the erased is here an active, dialectical backdrop, a pure absence that evokes and authorizes each and every presence from the pictures previously taken as a starting point. As for myself, I do not see it too far removed from a sense of gravitational anguish that Giacometti’s consumed figures elicit in me. Maurice Blanchot pointed out on one occasion that Giacometti sculpted distance, giving it to us and pushing us to it, a moving and rigid distance, capable of becoming abysmal in an instant. I think also of Gerhard Richter and of Luc Tuymans, who move towards a dissolution of the image as well. What they achieve through blurriness here is accomplished through omission. All those images, as these by Manoel Veiga, generate a conflict. It is a disconnection between what is, what the artist allows our eyes to see, and what we see. Just like in a poem, new possibilities of meaning will open with artworks that perchance float in our minds as an inseparable part of our visual history. Poetry. And I explain: in a poem, the proposition of an enigma is forever kept, like in these images, where the possible trembles, as if an event were about to unfold. The pictorial is taken to a frontier scenario.

In his Dark Matter, the artist removes color with Photoshop. I like the word used in Portuguese, "apagar" [to wipe away, but also to turn off] because here, more than ever, it takes on a double semantic value. Only the tissues survive, this whole universe of folds, so present in the history of painting. It is a neo-baroque work, true to a painting that is increasingly moving towards hybridization, towards the combination of digital and analogic. If there is something that characterizes the baroque, it is its tendency to the extremes. It’s about folding, unfolding and refolding, as Deleuze reminds us in reference to Leibniz. In Dark Matter, the theme overflows and its body is suggested.

These new works from the Dark Matter series are not far removed from the last paintings of Manoel Veiga, that seem to gravitate in an undefined space and let the painting itself do the work, in an action that began with the first achievements of an artist like Morris Louis, and in this case is revealed with a shy use of the brush, all but imperceptible, given that here the paint flows in an indirect way. Veiga introduces a new space, constructing a landscape similar to those of his photographs from the Hubble series. In all these works density is stratified, as if it were the formation of two cores in a thunderstorm. Much mathematical knowledge has been developed from studies that sought to understand chaos. In Hubble our starting point is the appropriation of high-resolution images from the cosmos, edited to become abstract images in black and white. This color inversion makes this image look even stranger to our eyes, for it becomes more poetic, more ineffable. The space, fictitious, reveals a world beyond our world, even though it be a result of the latter. Isn’t it perhaps the same effect as this original post-Caravaggio mannerism from Dark Matter?

The whole work of Manoel Veiga reveals itself as a sort of game about what isn't solved. The plot is subtle but decisive. Everything emerges slowly. As viewers, we are faced with a serenity that would be something like being in abandonment and in confinement in an open field – because the observation process is what is revealed as truly important, and beyond the viewed object is a determined choice to explore. Manners of perception are, in this sense, taken as a challenge, and Veiga works with options that don't express openly nor conceal completely, but rather indicate and insinuate, leaving everything in suspension. Meanwhile, a close look at his artworks reveals at once that his work follows two very different impulses: on the one hand, a first stage – of restriction, synthesis, apparent austerity when removing all that is deemed accessory; on the other hand, a dense curiosity for stories – stories that could only be examined with a tense look, with the experience of one who leaves space and time to observation, one who knows the story. Everything is distilled from a fragile balance between reality and its concealment, leaving blank spaces, parenthetical places that are born from perceptual fissures favored by a very pictorial deletion process. The viewing process is revealed and everything is projected in the dark. The speculative claims protagonism and observation becomes aware of its limits. Misperception works then as a trigger, as a challenge, as a singularity.

I think of the many times Antonioni said it is not by using better and better instruments that one will capture more and more beautiful images, but rather by going deeper into the subject matters, by better depicting the contradictions, the changes, the atmospheres; Veiga effectively follows his own experimental protocol: colors, textures, effects. That is why he constantly plays with visual disorders and perversions. This is what Maurice Blanchot defines as the experience of conforming some forms that veer towards the unknown – because time here may be experienced: in painting; in history. In Blanchot, it is the time of the unheard and the unthinkable, the obscure, or, more specifically, the lack of time, or present time without a presence. As in Manoel Veiga's forms of fractal appearance, everything overflows. In Dark Matter, it is history itself, in a sort of reincarnation of painting and its own achievements – because the years have passed and it is clear that we are still inclined to see the world in pictorial terms. When facing an image, we project an unconscious expectation derived from an irreversible contamination from previously acquired visual references.

Again, these reflections lead me to Yourcenar's quoted text, where she says the great enthusiasts for Ancient artworks restored out of kindness and out of kindness we undo their work. It may also be that we have gotten used to the ruins and wounds. But not only that. This habit and the tendency that our era feels towards the abstract lead us to love both this ruin and the passing of time. Both the form and the gesture that the artist imposes to his works are but a brief episode into each work, as it happens with those works by Caravaggio. Medardo Rosso asserted in the first of his writings: what matters in art is to make the viewer forget about the physical substance of the artwork. Rosso diluted the form and his figures experienced a process of dematerialization, as if lumps of wax surrounded them to leave them blind. And yes, I’m well aware that I’m speaking of sculptors, of pictorial sculptors to be more precise, – because these works by Manoel Veiga have a restraint distinctive of the best sculpture there is. What is beautiful here is that which is nonobjective, that which makes us think. Veiga designs his imaginary realm in this area of indeterminateness and operates a change of order. This was called 'shifting sequences' and even 'orders of sensation' by Francis Bacon. In Bacon, there is a rupture between the figure and the figurative. Here, as in the works by Bacon, there is a zone of indiscernibility, where everything tends to escape. That is why Deleuze points out the way in which the mouth in Francis Bacon is a hole from which the body escapes. Then flesh pours down, and color pours down... In Bacon the body is in transit. As in the paintings by Caravaggio in the hands of Manoel Veiga. It is not about looking at the image, but through it, letting the image unfold its richness. Gadamer calls this verweilen: to linger and not to rush. What we see is an interruption of reality itself, its time, its space. It is the image as friction, as an obscure curve, as a fold or fissure in our perception, a black shadow from which it is impossible to escape.