by Galciani Neves





One could easily assume that space (and subsequently its constitution) is no more than an attachment to scientificism that produces evidence of a type of ordering brought about by a given viewpoint – selected, for instance, to grant geometrical limits among its elements, – to explain its usage and function in the light of some mundane reasoning, or else to outline some aesthetically prescriptive discourse conceived in the academia, from supposedly unconnected disciplines, such as architecture, geography, history, physics, anthropology, urbanism, and so on. And that is why we have, as a far-from-insane corollary, albeit commonplace and dogmatic, one of those authorships – threading the path of our long history in search or knowledge, should define rules that transform space into a specific problem in accordance with some principles. In other words, there is indeed a comfortable insufficiency in our conjectures to experiment space. We could even think that art has cast its gaze on it at times, has suggested other rules of construction which came to add episodes to an understanding of space as image, as circulation, as artistic event – in a redundant assertion.

Let us assume, now, a supposed liberty to deal with the visible, the palpable, that on which we thread, that which let us be, our “where.” Then, let us assume that anything and everything we can ascribe to that which we defined as space is temporary and as we hurry to produce formulas that sound convincing, another condition comes up – i.e., the behavior is the comment, the reverie, just like a text written on sand at the seashore: a wave is always lurking and the stubborn writer rewrites her text with other meanings whenever there is a stretch of sand available. But, mind you, this is not nonsensical, and this is not a whimsical wish. It might as well be an invitation to visualizing a spatial condition that deals with a challenge that simultaneously erases and rewrites the story, creates other narratives, and welcomes an exploratory, fallible scrutiny.

Having presented these questions, we now turn to Manoel Veiga’s study on entering Caravaggio’s visual narratives. Please take notice of the verb “enter,” as well as of this definition of the master’s creations as narratives. Veiga escapes from the categorical habit of possible logics in (re)constructing the history of art as a mechanism of appropriation – usual strategy to so many artists. His procedure consists in entering (internalizing and getting lost in) a maze of human anatomies, their spaces, their behaviors. He stops whenever coming across each and every single part of the human body, groping for the air that fills up the space. This is not a consonance with features that would be progressive or conservative, revolutionary or nostalgic regarding the past – in Veiga’s case, personified in Caravaggio.

In his Dark Matter series, the artist dodges the archeological evidence that is established as a study of processes and methods as have been demonstrated in writings about the Italian painter in art history. The Brazilian artist’s interest falls on the premise that in Caravaggio’s spatial dimensions that narrate scenes and seem to depict instants there is a “where” to be re-evidenced as empty. It is with this sense of absence that Veiga translates Caravaggio. He simulates another depth in the perspective created by the painter and adds to it empty gaps. These are interstices comprised of black. Thus, the movement of entering turns into Veiga’s practice. The artist subtracts from the paintings their chromatic composition, reorganizes the space by means of a blackish drawing and what is left is the intervals between things: garments with their pleats, folds and ruffles, illusory perspectives of bas-reliefs, as well as the drapery that worked as a sort of theatrical framing for the Caravaggesque spaces. In these new settings, formulated by the presence of a deep black, Veiga actualizes a reconstruction of the image of the human body that in Caravaggio’s narratives had both a sense of action and a sense of scale, though not with any intention of annihilating the characters portrayed or their gestures. Veiga’s intention here is to dissolve such performativities and transpose them as indices in the garments of the characters and in these garments’ relation with the new space as formulated by the artist.

These architectures as translated from Caravaggio by Manoel Veiga are vocalizing an image/space that is presented as the possibility of perception of an analysis of the Caravaggesque ambience. It should be noticed that with the absence of the bodies, Veiga gives visibility to the limits of the objects, i.e., the describable boundaries between body and space. The artist tells the tale of a different Caravaggesque topography, one that illustrates Veiga’s version of reliefs for the master’s narratives: arms, legs, backs, trunks, these are all suggested and seem to be entangled, quartered; modulations of highs and lows between one body and another; boundaries between foreground and background and vanishing point; blurrings between bodies, objects and space, between the visible and their shadow. In this game of geographical inventiveness, parts of the human body – and of their ghosts, – are conjured up in action, and their ghosts vibrate in the shadowiness of the dark matter that is space. Therefore, it is apropos that it should come to our mind a well-known passage from one of Hamlet’s dialogues, when he asks his mother the Queen, “Do you see nothing there?”, and she replies, “Nothing at all; yet all that is I see” (3,4).