Men only understand one another
as far as imbued by the same passions.
(Stendhal)¹
Until the publication of Bechara's interview in Dardo magazine, “Finally a man with qualities”, a title playing against Robert Musil’s “The Man without Qualities”, I considered that an artist was
measured by his Promethean effort to reveal mystical truths, as put by Bruce Nauman in his work-manifesto. An artist’s true stature should be measured by his persistence and intelligence to transform something empirical -- thought --into recognized artistic skill. True intelligence after all, is often identified through qualities which are not apparent, of even through what we call intelligent obstinacy. Issues such as these stormed my mind when, last year, I found myself at a beautiful exhibition which brought together the works of Cézanne and Picasso. The juxtaposition -- in which Picasso revered Cézanne's mastery, either by copying him, at times literally, or through citation, assured me that artistic obstinacy is worthwhile at times. I immediately wrote José Bechara when I returned to the hotel, ecstatic with the revelation, and this is how our email exchange unfolded.
– Dear Bechara, it has taken me long to answer you, but there were reasons for such delay, both personal and not. I would still like to explain that I did not mean to interview you tout court, but instead, to exchange ideas on creation. That is why I am writing you now, having just returned from Arles, Nîmes, and Avignon, to my destination, Aix-en-Provence. The trip was neither
motivated by gastronomy, nor by the bullfights: I am here exclusively to visit the Picasso and Cézanne exhibition at the Musée Granet at Aix-en-Provence. It is curious that I had already been in these places, albeit it had never occurred to me that art could so profoundly mark a site. Thus, the Arles myth owes its existence to the fact that Van Gogh made the city known to us: we cannot distinguish the real city from the one depicted by him.
Cézanne started a revolution which shook the art world right here in this small southern European town. He changed art from the inside, and, in so doing, took the city beyond its walls... This exhibition, apart from its spectacular concept and many years of accumulated research, has helped me see even more clearly how some artists – and their own goals- are relentless forces in human nature. Cézanne was nine times refused by the Paris salons, but he persisted in his pictorial research. And, as the saying goes, revenge is best tasted cold. From that city, he not only land-marked Aix-en-Provence, but transformed forever all art that was to follow. What admirable tenacity, to face those steep inclines of Mount Victory to see the white rock grooves and be bathed in the streams of light changing the landscape at every minute! Cézanne transformed the physical experience of the landscape into a phenomenology of color, of sensation! I stood on that mountain, all my thoughts taken by Cézanne. Such is the power of art! The power which drove Picasso to seek out Cézanne's truth and buy the castle facing that very mountain. There, in front of Cézanne's mountain, Picasso takes his collections, made up, above all, of works by Cézanne and Matisse [...]
[...] Picasso always said that he was Cézanne's son, Cézanne being the father of all modernists. In one of his memorable sayings, he stated that an artist's true search is the one undertaken by Cézanne and taken up Van Gogh. For a true artist, all the rest would be false. In this exhibition there were a few exquisitely simple Picasso drawings in imitation of Cézanne's landscapes. A
small “Aixois” street, with is angular conjunctions of houses and roofs, carries us off to another dimension, to a world where the eye and the spirit are fused into one, as Bachelard declared about Cézanne. Cézanne attempted to excavate the flatness of the landscapes, while Picasso stressed the angularity present when he reinterpreted Cézanne. Such simplicity, such beauty, such forcefulness [...] It reminded me deeply of your sculpture of a house made in simple drawings stamps and washes – where the solid image of a house fluctuates in immaterial space, as if truly weightless, contrary to its nature.
Is the house, to put it like this, your mountain? Because it repeats itself a dozen, do hundreds of drawings juxtaposed to one another, look like an animated film, teeming with life, something solid fluctuating in space like a soap bubble?
In response to my speculations, the artist's letter seems to me even more emotional than my own:
– Hello Paulo [...] with such an introduction to your question, I don't even know what to say. Your description is cinematographic and romantic, so any response of mine would utterly pale before it. In all modesty, and in response to your question, the house – and all that it stands for, outside as well as inside – yes, it is my mountain. It has been that way for 10 years and it is present in my sculptures as well as in my drawings, and, in the latter, these bear the conflict you mention: that of a solid object, physically and psychologically solid, floating directionless. This is what it is, the simplest, most directly possible drawing. For me, it is like writing about the
impossibilities of daily life in spaces one begins to invent. However, it is not exactly in soap bubbles (although the idea you offer is more beautiful) that I see the houses floating. I really think of this as if there were no place for them. As if there was no place for them to settle into. I always think about a poem by Julles Supervielle which somewhat says the following:
I look in vaults that brutally surround me
Darkness overturned
In deep, deep boxes
As if no longer were of this world.
[...] I read this perhaps six or eight years ago, and ever since I have been thinking of the impossibilities of a state of things that “põe trevas de pernas pro ar” [overturn darkness]. This has greatly inspired me, and has driven me to produce The House and later, through drawings, I found a field wherein I could explore it better. Our email conversation has started a discussion on the practice of drawing, having evolved into something more metaphysical:
– […] Dear José Bechara, to begin with, we must distance ourselves, in our conversation, from a discussion of style as evoked by Wölflin. I believe that, at the time it was written, the author looked at the production of the past, having as goal to determining a distinction between Michelangelo and Raphael.
I think that, in modernity, the linear and pictorial practices have fused in the concept of object, and today it would have been impossible to write that book. Who is interested in the issue of whether an artist is pictorial or linear? I think that, back then, the distinction helped to distinguish one artist's form of action from another’s. That would be impossible nowadays.
Drawings were created as foundations, as preliminary “sketches” for a final work. Previously, there existed the notion of search, in the direction of a final destination, the painting. The modernist affirmation of the artist as freed from any kind of academicism – either formal or conceptual – was key in granting drawing definitive autonomy; a Picasso drawing, it is worth noting, is as valuable as a painting. I always think that a drawing is never something that searching beyond itself, but inside itself, for it requires great concentration on the part of the artist, don't you think? Since you are a painter who has persisted in the practice of solitary drawing, private, even intimate, and since your work has been developing itself incisively into other practices such as sculpture and installation, it is only now that your drawing has gained significance along with the other practices and media to the point of exhibiting it as autonomous. How did this take place, is it a way to show the complexity of your work?
– Paulo, starting from the last part of your question, thank you for considering the form “way to show the complexity of your work”. It is just daily work. My work researches painting, sculpture, and drawing, and attempts to interplay these media with visual experiments in hopes that the resulting artistic object, a sculpture, for example, implies in an idea for a painting [...] The time elapsing between them is not measured by conventional time- measuring tools. It is a time unique to the choices I make when I think about what I am producing, even if this is not yet clear to me. I have recently realized, that this is one of the reasons for organizing and publishing this book, that the drawings I have produced over the past 20 years are, at one and the same time, letters about things I have done, as well as autonomous pieces.
This is something I rely on to bring together the body of work in this book, which I classify in different categories; among them, drawings made for a project, drawings at the service of a final piece, a problem you also touch on.
Well, even these drawings are autonomous to a degree: this double quality is an
issue that transpires in the book. Now, as to how to identify this duplicity is not all clear to me; it is fine to say that “from modernism onwards, etc...” During the time I produced the drawings, (or if you prefer, during which I drew) I used to see them as a separate area of my daily work, which, in the beginning, when I had just left the Parque Lage, was painting. And I used to draw, let's say, silently, as if I “wrote”, and “put down” ideas and, while I was doing so, I thought: “It was for myself, and for no one else, for no ulterior purpose beyond drawing itself [...] and this used to offer me, as it still does, great freedom. It has only been in the last few years that I became more confident in investigating drawing, in exhausting my possibilities in this area. To finish, I don't think that this is a way to display, decipher, the relations and connections in my work, but rather a path to approach the body of my work in painting and sculpture.
I think that José Bechara's work, as Fátima Lambert writes “develops around precise concepts which translate the centrality of art in relation to life, in a sense that I would dare say, is practically that of 'survival'. Thus emerge productions around the series The House (Casa) for example, the paintings called Cadernos rápidos, Mercúrio and Paramarelos. To abide in, to be in [...], on the one hand, and, on the other, to reaffirm abstract and cognitive fields through writing, drawings and objects able to channel it, are privileged domains which synthesize the cohesion of the aesthetics and thought of a Brazilian (as artist) author”. A type of expansion of the already- expanded fields, which are the practices of sculpture, drawing, painting and installation. A work of art today exists as a symptom of continued expansion, as we can see in artists such as Franz Ackerman, Tobias Rehberger, and José Bechara, as they evoke a random and de-ambulating disposition between sculpture, drawing and painting.
Nicolas Bourriaud wrote, in a brief essay entitled “relational aesthetics”, that artistic activity is not comprised of an immutable essence, but of a play in which form, modality, and function, evolve according to social settings and historical period. Critics evoke the notion of time and space to understand a work of art in a global world. He notes that art critics are charged with the task of studying artworks in the present, exchanging information with artists, studying their motivations and acting as intermediaries with the public. Borriaud thus complains, stating that modern criticism has reached a point of relative exhaustion, having been emptied out of the aesthetic criteria of content, drawing on judgment handed down from the past which we continue to apply to current artistic practice. This is illogical, since “novelty is no longer valid criteria, except for among those outdated detractors of modern art who retain of the hateful present only of that which their traditionalist culture taught them to find abominating in the art of the past.” In order to create more efficient tools and more adequate points of view, it is important to apprehend the transformations currently happening in the social world, capture what has already changed and what continues to change. How can one understand the artistic behaviors manifested over the last two decades and their lines of thought, if not by partaking in the same situations as the artists, this is the issue posed by Bourriaud. It posits that it is only possible to arrive at an answer through sharing experience. Allied to intelligent obstinacy, artists must experience their artistic reveries, float like a soap bubble, or throw “darkness overturned in deep, deep boxes, as if no longer were of this world”.
Paulo Reis
Lisbon, January 2010
1 C'est que les hommes ne se comprennent qu'à mesure qu'ils sont animés des
mêmes passions Stendhal. Oeuvres de Stendhal, v. 28.
2 Dardo, nº 9. Santiago de Compostela: Dardo ds, 2008.
3 “Cézanne – Picasso, deux maîtres face à face“. Musée Granet, Aix-en-Province,
França, 2009.
4 Emails exchanged with the artist.
5 Heirich Wolflin. Fundamental Concepts of Art History. São Paulo: Martins
Fontes.
6 Maria de Fátima Lambert. In José Bechara – essa “cinza das horas”. Available
at www.josebechara.com
7 Nicolas Bourriaud. Esthétique relationnelle. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998
(Estética relacional. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2009).