Known as a painter and more recently for his installations, José
Bechara also draws. Never before however, have his drawings been shown
or brought to the public as comprehensively as in this publication,
although some of them already had been shown in exhibitions and
catalogs. These drawings are little known not only to the general
public, but also for those intimate with contemporary art.
A
great number of contemporary artists, like Bechara, draw. Even those
who have become famous for using unconventional and experimental media,
materials, supports and techniques. Drawing began to gain some
independence from the media it served in the second half of the 19th
century: its quick and synthetic renderings made it useful for studies,
the stage in which artists prepared paintings and sculptures, but it
also ended by depriving drawings of having its own goals.
In the
dynamics of the modern urban industrial world, social transformations
and the speed of transportation and communications have meant valuing
the instant and instantaneous, systematizing the essential processes of
human action, and consequently, experimentation.
All this favored
a new place for drawing in art. Considered previously a lesser art with
respect to painting and sculpture, drawing's singular qualities have
once again regained value because it is so attuned to modernity. Three
elements, project, expression and automatism, found in drawing a
privileged medium.
This growth of drawing, however, was not
limited solely to art. With the entertainment of the masses came new
forms of expression for drawing, illustrated magazines, political
cartoons, caricatures, comic strips and posters. As these areas grew,
new possibilities emerge, possibilities of invention and expansion, as
illustrated for example, in the widespread use of graffiti and tattoos
in the last few decades.
Of the various craft techniques we
inherited from the past, drawing was therefore, the technique that most
easily adapted, overcoming obstacles, updated itself. The fact it
requires such elementary tools, that one can draw almost anywhere in a
variety of situations and circumstances, its portability and speed,
places it at an essential locus in contemporary art: where poetics are
sketched, in which ideas are matured and where thoughts and projects
are made visual through records that are autonomous and imbued with
their own artistic expression, regardless possible future developments.
Nor is it an exaggeration to note that drawing also involves a
contiguitity between gesture and result that brings it to the same
level of writing. But that is not to equate it to writing, its
rationale and morphology are completely different. It is another
medium, irreplaceable, for recording thoughts and sensation.
Drawings are thus, products located at the root of the creative
process. They can be seen as an exclusive notation of singular poetic
processes, expression of intimate situations, predictors of artworks
and projects, while also the appropriate medium for imaginary
buildings, whether laboriously or evanescently suggested detailed.
Drawing therefore, if we allow ourselves some license to establish the
analogy, suggests it is proximate to mediums of immediate technological
visual apprehension, such as have been made possible by digital cameras
and video.
As to drawing in the arts (both in art theory as well
and in the practice and reflections of artists) drawing has also
expanded, extending¹ from the surface of paper into real space, to new
medias and to the body in action.
Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing shown
for the first time in 1971 in New York's Guggenheim Museum; a few of
Dennis Oppenheim's videos, such as A Feedback Situation and Two Stage
Transfer Drawing, created in 1971; works by Cildo Meireles, such as La
Bruja (shown at the XVI São Paulo 1981 Biennial) and the work Malhas da
Liberdade, its first version dates from 1977; as well as a considerable
part of Waltércio Caldas's sculptures (O Ar Mais Próximo, from 1991, A
Série Negra from 2005 and Olhos D'água, from 2008, to name a few), are
examples of the expansion of drawing².
Today it is difficult to
understand drawing if we base ourselves on concepts or repertoires that
were used in the past to distinguish it clearly from painting or
sculpture. The media overflowed the borders of their conventional
supports, expanding their rationale to areas understood, at first, to
belong to foreign techniques. In place of clearly marked ancient
boundaries, new intersections emerged, overlaying and undoing borders,
this happened not for lack of rigor, but as a manifestation of the
modus operandi of late capitalism and its foundations on networks. The
permanent connection and exchange of practices, ideas and concepts only
became possible by stretching, to the pint of unraveling, boundaries
that in the past distinguished (and separated) different
specializations, brought about by specific and easily recognizable
areas, whether they belonged to specific trades, professions, the
theoretical sciences or technology.
Such background issues can
clarify not only the various fronts in which José Bechara's drawings
unfold, but also the connection between these drawings and his body of
work: paintings produced through oxidizing surfaces of used tarpaulins
taken from trucks; the Pelada Series created from white leather of
nelore cattle; installations recreating houses that seem to expel
furniture from windows and doors, and the recent series, still
untitled, made up of spatial drawings or graphic sculptures.
Bechara has become known for paintings that build on the marks left by
the passage of time on objects appropriated by him. Bechara initially
worked with tarpaulins taken from the backs of trucks that had been
worn by daily use, he would offer truck drivers new ones in exchange
for the used ones. Bechara would then work on the surfaces marked with
the damage produced by daily life, oxidizing them by applying steel
wool sponges. Taken from the world of daily use, the supports for his
paintings had already been worn out from the accumulated wear and tear
before they entered the art world. By deliberately intervening in this
field of random engraving, Bechara awards them new qualities it in
another dimension of time.
A similar process takes place in the
paintings created on a very different surface: white leathers taken
from nelore cattle, which is why they belong, according to the artist's
own choice of title, to the series, Pelada.
Clearly Bechara
chose nelore leather for its chromatic and graphic characteristics. To
Bechar’s eyes the leather’s whiteness shows the unmistakable remains of
scars and brandings made with hot irons on the cattle's bodies. This
aesthetic sense adds to other spheres of meaning, of symbolic content,
or semantic content. The abrasions on the skins are more than random
graphic markings; they have also become the marks of a life destined to
certain death in the slaughter houses. If the whiteness of the skins is
a graphic evidence of life, it also, on the other hand, even if only
invisibly, evokes the blood shed before they became immaculate, as they
are now. Markers of José Bechara's trajectory, these works already show
signs of the poetics recurrent in his work, the crystallization of time
and space.
The tarps, patched and stained through everyday use
and scars on nelore leathers are signs of the random action of time
over surfaces. By interrupting it, by appropriating himself of them,
Bechara adds another layer of temporality to the one instilled in the
support's previous existence. They are therefore works conceived as
condensation, in the work’s space, of various periods of time.
Similarly, the artist's installations and graphic sculptures also take
on poetic meanings through the spatial condensation of previous events
impregnated in them. On the other hand, unlike the paintings, these
works do not explore the marks that life produces on supports (as in
the case of the truck tarps and the lenore skins) prior to the artist's
appropriation.
Bechara's work is the construction of spaces in
which unique and fictional irruptions take place (such as, for example,
houses expelling furniture through windows and doors). Here too,
although in a different manner, the reasons for such events do not
belong to the rationale of the works since they are not sequential
narratives, they are signs. Their meaning emanates from the tension
between such states of flux and crystallization in his work.
The
inexorable work of time on objects, assumed by this artist as a
fundamental part of his own work process, continues in different pace
after the work of art is finished, even if works of art when compared
to objects of daily use may seem eternal. Bechara not only accepts the
inevitable wear and tear of objects, but appropriates it as part of his
own work.
All these poetic operations are permeated by his
drawings. They have their own goals and specific demands, but remain
permanently connected. The drawings can emerge as notes for projects,
for other works, as exercises and unbounded reveries, or they can
become intersections with painting and sculpture.
If we
disregard taxonomic concerns, it is possible to group Bechara’s
drawings provisionally in five sets: Cadernos Rápidos, free style
drawings, project designs, spatial drawings (or graphic sculptures) and
finally, the drawings that belong to the Air Series.
In
Cadernos Rápidos Bechara submitted eighty Japanese paper sheets
programmed oxidizing for a period of one hundred and twenty days, much
like the tarp paintings.
The title would seem contradictory, in
light of the time frame of oxidation. But in the case of Rápidos speed
does not refer to the time elapsed while they were impregnated with
rust. Speed relates to simultaneity. Eighty sheets of paper began and
finished their transformation in a single period of time, without
interruption.
Shown for the first time in 1999, at the Paço
Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, the work took up two walls at an angle to
each other, in which the sheets of paper placed side by side, and from
the ground to the ceiling of the exhibition room, created an
oscillating panel that oscilated with the movement of the air that was
pushed about by the visitors in the room.
The oxidation was
programmed to stain, thoroughly, the surfaces of Cadernos Rápidos'
sheets of paper in various tonalities of rust. Therefore they are not
technically drawings, since the tonal spread of the support, on the one
hand, and the use of the sheets of paper, on the other, place them at
the intersection of these two techniques.
There are another set
of drawings, created regularly since 1987, that remain at the margins
of issues that characterize the body of Bechara's work. They are free
style drawings that show no overt commitment other than joy in medium,
but which nevertheless, according to the artist himself, bring about
flashes or snapshots that, like the flashes of fireflies, ignite ideas
for new works. Bechara had never given these drawings an important role
in his poetic constellation, the drawings are almost always still lives
of minimal elements, lightly sketched in ink and at times, light washes
of watercolor.
The figurative elements in these drawings,
vases, fruits, are not characteristic of his work. It goes beyond the
traditional use of techniques that have been consecrated in painting –
the canvas, brushes, and paints – and more recently sculpture, because
his poetic strategy is not associated to valuing the job and exercise
of artisans. In addition, the drawings' figurative content and flow of
gesture seem foreign to those of us who know José Bechara's work.
Located at the margins of the more recognizable aspects of his
production, these works are now being shown for the first time. They
can be understood as an Other in his work, an alternative that was
until now invisible in relation to the projects being developed. A way
to forget and escape habitual artistic practice, while it certainly has
contributed to formulating issues present in his work.
In the
opposite direction, but also marginal to the core of his works, are the
project drawings. They do not properly constitute a series, since their
role is the jotting down of ideas and thoughts, part of the gestation
process that do not always lead to a work's execution.
This
spatial geometric organization – an organization that is historically
associated to reason and to the project, opposed to expression and
chance - is also characteristic of other series produced by Bechara.
But quite unlike what it may seem, such organization is not the result
of a prior detailed project, even if some of these drawings contain
notes on size and even color and materials. These drawings therefore,
are not even independent works, nor are they projects in the habitual
sense, that show a detailed and precise prefiguring of the final work.
The deliberate incompleteness of these projects are the foundations,
then, of processes, not results: the action of time in space, paintings
oxidizing on tarps and the Cadernos Rápidos, open installations and the
graphic sculptures, for example, are signs of works produced based on
ideas in which chance is vital poetic component.
In 2002 there
was a decisive turning point in José Bechara's work. It began at the
Faxinal das Artes, an event held at the city of Faxinal in the interior
of Paraná state. Bechara was one of one hundred artists invited from
all over the country who, along with close to 40 people from other
areas, set up camp, living an entire fortnight dedicated to the back
and forth of ideas and development of experiences. The group resided in
houses that had had once belonged to teachers in Paraná state.
Bechara had been invited to paint, but time passed and as he reached
the end of his stay, he found he had not been able to come up with even
a thread of a proposal. As he put it himself, he was then taken by an
idea that changed the course of his work.
As he looked out of
the window of his house, he noticed it framed the night sky, but he did
not see it as landscape – that is, not as the familiar metaphor created
by Renaissance painters, the painting as a window – but as emptiness.
The words came to him and he wrote them down: fill in the emptiness. He
took the table in front of him and fit it through the window, then took
other pieces of furniture and began to fill in the remaining windows
and doors, suggesting that they were being ejected outside. New
possibilities of poetic invention opened up, located at the ambiguous
intersection between sculpture, installation and later, drawing.
Bechara was interested at first in the notion of producing sculptures
through addition not subtraction. Sculpture built through appropriation
and assemblage – opening up hybrid paths by appropriating real
objects, paths taken both by Marcel Duchamp (ready-made), and by late
cubism (Picasso) – and not, as perhaps the term construction could
suggest, from propositions derived from early 20th century Russian
constructivism, whose fully projected buildings took on a unique
structural makeup.
Faxinal is at the origin of Bechara's great
installations, made up of life size houses built by the artist (they
were in practice parallelepipeds, with no other details than windows
and doors) that expel furniture purchased in shops.
The
installations unfolded in scaled sculptures produced in the 2005 to
2009 series Open House. Cubic structures with openings like a house.
From this series emerged, from 2009 onwards, a three dimensional series
that is still untitled (there are four works so far) that can
understood as spacial drawings, since they are formed by cubes composed
only by their edges, combined with freely placed miniature
installations in the corners of the exhibition area. They project
shadows on the walls around them, extending the spacial drawings or
graphic sculptures into real space.
Made of a variety of
materials – wood, steel, aluminium and acrylics – and in various sizes,
these works already point to the future of Bechara's work.
It is
however important to note that all his works centering on the House,
that began at Faxinal, have a thematic dimension that was absent in his
previous work. The House is, certainly, for practically everyone, a
place for intimacy, cozyness, confort, security and protection. To
bring out this inner world through ejecting furniture is not, thus, an
event of purely spatial meaning: whether related to sculpture,
installation or graphic media. It is a choice that also enters other
fields, that reverberates in a dimension that is also symbolic.
The instability suggested in the contrast between an inner world and
the irruption of furniture reappears transformed in the drawings of the
Ar Series. Begun at the end of 2008, these drawings depict small
houses, of almost childlike traits, stamped on paper with a background
that is made of washes that creates an air-like environment. Beyond its
unorthodox technique (if we consider that to stamp a drawing is
coherent with Bechara's tecniques, media and usual procedures) these
houses up in turmoil, unstable movement, as if torn away from their
original ground, suggest ideas and propose stories.
In an
exercise that is above all speculative, with no pretentions to reaching
final conclusions, we can, for example, take the drawings of this
series as signs of the ceaseless dynamics of time that changes
everything, or even, as graphic icons of the tension that pits
stability against movement, and perhaps, like the house pulled out by a
tornado from tedious life in Kansas, careening towards Oz, the emblem
of the promissing insecurity that moves adventure.
_______________________________________________________________
¹ In this sense, see the article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, by Rosalind Krauss, (originally published in “The anti-aesthetic: essays of postmodern culture” Washington: Bay Press, 1984) to characterize the new status of sculpture after its dissociation from the rationale of monuments.
² Sol Le Witt’s wall drawings were made directly on large walls based on the systems conceived by the artist, but carried out by third parties. They were shown for the first time in 1971, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.