Diogo Nogueira – “Encontro Inesperado”

ALPHABETS FOR ANOTHER LANGUAGE

By Maria Brás Ferreira

“Car Je est un autre”

Arthur Rimbaud

For the ancient, crisis corresponded to a moment of observation, the period of time in which, after the doctor applied the balsam to the patient, its body reacted to the treatment, healing or, on the other hand, intensifying the degree of the illness. Crisis is, by definition, a localized phenomenon, signified and powered by the intelligent gaze of someone who experiences it and makes a fundamental minimum analysis. Both exhibitions, Encontro Inesperado, by Diogo Nogueira and Uma Cerveja no Inferno, with works by Carla Castiajo, Dylan Silva, Inês Coelho, João Paulo Balsini, Pedro Moreira, Raul Macedo and Susana Chiocca, a title borrowed from teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud, curated by Manuel Santos Maia, could be joined under the crisis cipher, as an interval of visual dedication and instant of generation of expectations on a time and form yet to come. The thinking about the body doesn’t necessarily have to follow the bifurcation between, on the one hand, an interpretation of an organic-scatological becoming and, on the other hand, on the sphinx image, motionless and polished of prosthetic symbols figuratively agglutinated to the body, hence sublimated. It will be more interesting to expose and to follow a thinking about the body, register its strategies of seduction, withdrawal, protection and nutrition, its lato sensu investitures. Naturally, placing the body, as agent and landscape, at once as limit and threshold – on the dissection table, entails the rupture with the so called normal time, the one stipulated by the calendar; to think the body like the heterotopies of Michel Foucault, in a mythical and real contestation of the space where we live will throw the spectator’s testimony to the inverted side of a time – ours – yet to be known. Maybe that is why Jacques Rancière spoke of the lack of actuality of the contemporary being, the one who precisely sees himself recognised in the time that escapes him, in the time which inevitably is always further ahead. And if it is possible to apprehend time in an expressive way, it is as physical and actuating mediation of a passage. The contemporary, the being that inhabits the trail of that fleetingness: tempus fugit. Addressing, therefore, the body to the narrow and anachronic corridor of an inadequacy that may both irritate and mesmerize: to overcome oneself. If the body is what is overcome, then it is indeed immediately another thing, through the dialectic action of the mind from which the being – as a whole – distances itself from the first. From a thing which is mine, the body becomes – bound by an image elaborated by the activation of the five senses that we have – another thing, and temporarily, of another.

A toponymical obstinacy probes this diverse structure, composed by members, covered in skin, formed by muscles, bones, veins, arteries and inner organs, which for convenience – as with all language we use daily – we call body; a probe that traverses the other bodies and places to which it is associated, completing the united and singular as an impossible finishing (here in the double sense of the word). To think the body, describing it, evoking the words arranged for it by language. Or was it not the opposite? The body dictating the birth of the language? The place (habitable, a body) of a gallery is the one which, like the poetically ritualized exhaustive repetition in an emptying of sense – by Gertrude Stein, the verse “a rose is a rose is a rose” – allows the dislocation of the normative functions of the figures and the return to the body, spurning the strategic shelter in the absence of the form of flesh, that would confer to everything the triumphant note of the beginnings. Instead of surrounding an in-formity, build the shapeless form of the artistic essay. Both the paintings of Diogo Nogueira, in the solo exhibition, as well as the works of the remaining artists, in the group exhibition, derive from a figurative scope. They are not exactly the organisation of a shapeless mass or the sublimation of intractable materials. On the contrary, the general movement is one of distortion and blur: from pubic hair, plastic bags, ceramics, cotton, bulbs, to the bed, to the fire, to oil and to acrylic, a series of expectations are led to make the association of normal meanings – already existing in a particular figuration – with the one proposed by the exhibited work of art. Hence, we can talk about crisis and distortion. The figurative corresponds here to a previous conceptual condition, in opposition to a conventional use of the artistic gesture that would distinguish in the creative act the mission of sewing loose knitwear, forming scribbles, diagramming the rudimentary destinations of the hand. On top of the ready seam, prepare to weave one’s own seam.

Diogo Nogueira, a clear inheritor of Gauguin and Matisse, initiates a gesture of conciliation between a fruitful care with colours, given the codes they more or less consciously arouse in the spectator, and the attention to form, the primitivism or syntheticism of which – a technique created by Gauguin – are distorted in favour of the fauvist kind of movement. In that sense, the sharp colours faint for the uprising of a passionate emphasis of the paintings. The aesthetic meaning and rapture caused by these paintings derive from a subterranean sphere of the sense, a more or less present past, from where a last form of life can be extracted, as if after the outbreak of civilization, from which the language of men would finally be universal, founded in a generalised amnesia: the return to the body, to the gesture, as fundamental means of communication. Precisely as in the rock panels, in the Chauvet and Lascaux caves, but in a symbolic inversion, no longer the beginning of the world, but the dream that can still be dreamt after the end. A return to the natural, but a natural that does not resist certain human codes, for the memories that still propitiate about them. The man who trained his hand attained virtuosity and there is no way to return to nature except by building large panels, as totemic as they are choreographic, and also political. Thus, in the same way the gestures represented in Nogueira’s works are simple and refer to activities practiced by men since the beginning of time, there is an intention – coming, who knows, from a profound interest to play with iconographies – to actualise certain codes, bring them up to date, inhabit this time.

As a synthesis, opera, total work, we might think Uma Cerveja no Inferno as a bestiaire or an anthology about the body: from the sex images – act and organ, i.e., as an erotic dance, memory of pleasure or part of a game yet to come – in the works of Carla Castiajo and Inês Coelho, to the split between a decorative and artistic intention of the first artist as well as Pedro Moreira, to the choreographic platform, lyric and profane, of the bed, in “Being Fond”, of Raul Macedo, to the erotic use of the almost lascivious distortion of Dylan Silva’s aquarelles, in relation to which the thickness of the oil of João Paulo Balsini results in a provocative combination, that from the image of the book signifying a home scene of two men in bed, evolves to an anonymous retained portrait, liberating in the end, up to Susana Chiocca’s “Búzio”, in which the duplicity at first identified with regard to sex as act and organ gains a particular force because it stages movements that precisely operate the dialogue between the functionality of a body that simply lives, and the assumption of an unavoidable sexuality, as an image producing machine: more or less unprecedented ghosts.

A performance by António Lago, Em Sequência,  is added to the two exhibitions, in which the artist offers the key word to the insidious deconstruction of regulatory expressions: “in the eminence “instead of “imminence”) of danger”, followed by “counter attacks (in lieu of “counter-attack”) of asphyxia”, by means of which the alert becomes a poetic form of mobilizing the spectator. The film É um outro país, of Manuel Santos Maia, opens with the signature of a note of hope that, no doubt, oriented the curator in assembling this multiple artistic cycle. It is, therefore, a letter from an I to another (I) that was built in the sense of the spectra of otherness that this programming evokes: metaphoric specimen of a making of.

In the dark, to be open to the flashing of a light that shines, interrogate the space we inhabit having in mind the understanding of the other. Turn destiny into a raised fist, and death in a way of demanding more from life. With the whole body.

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