by Guy Amado
(translated from Portuguese by Thomas Nerney)







Abstract painting as a genre long ago moved beyond schematic or fixed notions and now covers a wide range of different approaches and procedures. For the last 50 years at least, an extensive list of artists have been reexamining and expanding the potential for expression in this language. And it is in this field - with a certain looseness in categorization - that Manoel Veiga's pictorial facture is situated. Over recent years, he has been developing personal artistic investigation in the domains of abstraction and his current work appears to have attained an originality that reaffirms the experimental nature of his practices.

The notion of fluidity, already a recurrent feature in Veiga's poetics, now takes on an almost literal interpretation. He has arrived at a pictorial solution that involves a prosaic and peculiar way of producing his compositions by directly attacking the support on the floor. This is a deliberate artifice to undermine the action of gravity and thus allow the refined solution of acrylic pigments - which he prepares beforehand and 'conducts' with sprays of water - to spread around the canvas through diffusion, in an amorphous expansion over the surface that lends a certain randomness to the undertaking. Veiga then goes on to operate with little control over the end result, in a situation of “controlled probability”. This involves a certain level of risk - but it also holds the potential for surprisingly beautiful compositions: the emulsion evanesces and sediments against the white field of the canvas to only then reveal what becomes the finished work.

The set of works shown here brings out the innovative elements in Veiga's facture. In these sensitive compositions, the expressivity of gesture emphasized in his previous painting is now limited to the inaugural brushstrokes of the work as an index of discreet presence, which the rarefied structure of this new work occasionally enables us to glimpse. These initial brushstrokes are ultimately his only concession to a more 'traditional', so to speak, idea of pictorial procedure. Thereafter the process follows a course dictated by the unstable behavior of liquids on surfaces, although mediated by the artist's intuition.

Perhaps because of their being created using a rather unorthodox method, or perhaps because we are increasingly being assaulted by a compulsive electronic visuality in everyday metropolitan life, these pieces are endowed with a quality that is alien to the conventional notion of painting: they are like 'fake-monotypes' of ethereal presence and sometimes allude to the artificial sophistication of digital images. The sensitivity of the patterns that spontaneously emerge in the outlines of the “stain-shapes” spreading over the canvas - or being restricted by it, we do not know which – may evoke a dreamlike cartography of imprecise gradients, or the amusing fractal-like microscopic formations associated with chaos theory.

Manoel Veiga has long been interested in investigating aspects of physics, and especially quantum mechanics, which hearks back to his previous career in engineering. This now takes on added relevance and becomes an element that potentializes different interpretations of his work. His canvases may be viewed as dynamic structures and unstable systems of indefinite harmony in which the semi-random action of the elements prompts quiet reflection on temporality and the record of the actual facture.