Take it easy your country is disappearing

The collective exhibition “Take it easy your country is disappearing,” at the Zé dos Bois Gallery (ZdB) between 20 October 2012 and 23 February 2013, was part of a larger programme to celebrate the association’s 18 years of activity and thus its “coming of age.” These years correspond to a remarkable—and remarkably productive—longevity on the Portuguese contemporary art scene.¹ However, the exhibition’s intent was not anthological or retrospective. Rather, it showed works from artists close to the ZdB: from the current resident artists, at the start of their careers, to already established artists who have been working with the ZdB for more than a decade.

It is also the present which sets the tone of the exhibition: the title, with its extremely ambiguous meaning, suggests a stance that simultaneously confronts (or affronts) and distances itself when faced with a present said to be in crisis. In line with this ambiguity, it is not a politically committed or interventive art, in spite of the starting position—right at the entrance—given to an older work by activist-artist Rigo 23 (1966): Hulk—Dr. Bruce Banner, dating from 1988, an ostentatiously framed image of the hero/monster of the title. (Within the ZdB programme, but at the Sá da Costa bookshop, the same artist also presented a more political installation in October 2012, 2010, Fátima na Ribeira Seca, result of his involvement with a religious and political struggle of a Madeiran community.)

The country which, according to the title, is in the process of disappearing (“a Kafkaesque scenario,” as the introductory text puts it), is not necessarily the crisis-ridden Portugal depicted in the news. The ruinous scenario foreseen in the title seems rather to be a starting point; a portrait of some disenchanted land in which, and against which, the proposals presented are set, as fictions about “a desired and different experience” which may act, at the same time, as a reflection or review of the possibilities of experiencing the real, without giving in to the current “overriding pessimism.”

The small picture Walking around, looking beyond, by Carlos Gaspar (1988), at the staircase leading to the first floor, may serve as an introduction to some of the possible issues found in the exhibition. In the picture, a soldier/glazier walks in a undefined, nocturnal landscape, a kind of no man’s land. Instead of a machine gun, he holds a pane of glass that, not having a head, the figure supports on his neck. The small picture opens up to at least two interpretations that are, however, mutually exclusive, dealing as much with our relationship to reality as with the narrower theme of representation in art (with distorted echoes of the classical theory of the painting as a window):

1. The image as false transparency, in which the glass, rather than allowing us to see, acts as a shield, like armoured glass, which divides the world: a type of blindness disguised as transparency which conceals violence.

2. The image as possibility of seeing beyond the blindness of an immediate, desperate reality without alternative, through an artistic gesture which, heteropically and precariously, creates the possibility of utopia.

Two elements in Gaspar’s picture are repeated frequently throughout the exhibition: in terms of iconography, the desolate landscape (often in the form of a desert); in terms of concepts, the issue of (in)visibility and (non-)transparency, that is, of the elusive nature of images, which hide as much as they reveal. A common theme seems to be the conflicting, indirect relationship with the real, which is solved (or is un-solved, and hence made effective) as painting or, more broadly, as image. In other words, the relationship with the real is situated precariously in the gap of the image. The option for dark rooms, with little illumination, helped underline these exercises in visibility and hiding. (The option for an information sheet instead of labels, which one needed to hold in front of the works in order to have enough light to read it and be able to identify the works, does not, however, seem to have been deliberate.)

The desolate landscapes populated by detritus from universes of images with a wide range of origins (from the history of painting, among others), by Gonçalo Pena (1967), which perhaps only the only act of painting can redeem, or the arid valleys of the Drawing untimely series by Mattia Denise (1967), in which a lonely figure disintegrates (and is therefore integrated into the landscape), perhaps get closest to the “Kafkaesque scenes” mentioned in the introductory text. In the series The desire of an infinite contingency, by the same artist, there are demiurgic figures (artists?) constructing landscapes in which they conduct strange experiences. In the film Ὄρνιθες, by Gabriel Abrantes (1984), an extraordinary story about the presentation—in the original Greek!—of Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds in a Haitian village, the desert contrasts with the tropical foliage surrounding an old man, telling the misfortunes of his wife, transformed into a goat.

On the other hand, the setting of the unstoppable, patient rotation of a rudimentary camel, in the installation With less than a lot of thirst, at the rear-end of the world, by Filipe Felizardo (1985), was rather more airy. Its appearance, almost platonic from a distance (an eternal circular journey of shadows, through a scattered landscape with the consistency of dreams: desert, clouds, glacier…) proved, in the room, to be a precarious composition of multiple, handmade projections (through shadows, a mirror and a magic lantern). The same fascination with technique and the ability to create universes can be found in Hammer of the gods, by Alexandre Rendeiro (1988), here using muffled music that, in an installation with seductively sparse media, is transformed in the movement of suspended nails, in defiance of gravity.

Different approaches to the problem of the possibilities of the image can be found in Strangler by Alexandre Estrela (1971), and Crown, by Sílvia Prudêncio (1981), but it is in the work by the duo João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva (1979 and 1977), A lamp in the desert, that these issues are set out most clearly. In the piece, an image (resonating with literary and theoretical echoes, from ancient prophesies to knowledge theory) is shown to depend on darkness and concealment.

There is, in these pieces, something of a magical game, in which one is asked to willingly suspend disbelief, to let ourselves be misled even though we know about the illusion. The speaker and the spirit, by Musa Paradisiaca (a duo composed by Eduardo Guerra and Miguel Ferrão, both born in 1986), explicitly refers to this theme. The continuous playing of (fragments of?) a conversation that the artists had with Marco Pasi, an historian specialising in religion, esotericism and magic, is accompanied by projections of apparently banal sentences and doodles. But these elements subtly interact, riven by a series of tensions (of time, distance, intelligibility, sharing and inaccessibility, and also of translation). There is, in the moment of public presentation, an obscure doubling of the matter discussed in the dialogue (invocations, the double nature of words, both doubts and belief…).

Finally, going back to one of the first pieces in the exhibition, The double, by Tiago Baptista (1986), also deals with the issue of the real and its depiction, without ever leaving the field of the painting itself. He takes up the tale of Pliny the Elder, on the origins of art as mimesis or replica of the real, allegorically represented by three “states”: the moulding of the model, reproduction of the mould, final result. However, the allegory is subtly subverted, both by the aggression of the act of moulding, as if the act of tracing an image from the real was inherently violent, and by the ironic failure of the truth of the image. The plaster head in the right corner of the painting is clearly different from the male model: it is older, but also more serious, even heroic, as if denying the ability, at the root of the myth, to preserve identity and appearances in the face of the decline inflicted by the passing of time.

This piece leads us, therefore, back to the (dis)appearing country mentioned in the exhibition’s title, and to the ambiguous position in relation to the real which it seems to lay claim to. We are asked to enter a game in which the illusion—the “magic circle” of representation—is never fully completed. This desired sabotage (and notice the recurrent use of the anachronous, the obsolete, the outmoded) underlines the elusive nature of representation that—and it is here, perhaps, that we may find the possibility of a political interpretation of the exhibition—is presented as a condition for the engendering of other temporalities and experiences, set against a present which is said to have no alternative.