AUTHOR: IVO MARTINS
EDITION: (Catalogue) Centro Cultural Vila Flor DATE: April 2009
Art does not aim at achieving factual truth in its making, and even with the advent of powerfully technological
devices for capturing reality one will never manage to efficiently apprehend or communicate the enormous
subjective charge that accompanies all images. The non-material side of this reality will never be able to be
transmitted through the increasing of the degree of veracity of pictures that are painted, drawn, photographed or
filmed, or of the countless built and sculpted objects. The scope of our explanations would lead one to place the
paintings and drawings brought together here in this exhibition as moments of fixing a reality that accepts not
being able to deal with all the artistic solicitations that imagination requires in its impulse to discover new forms
of overcoming and exalting the real. Joćo Queirozs painting and drawing invents a reality that possesses an
aesthetic dimension of its own, less committed and more free of the references from which come the natural
elements that form it, giving rise to an almost invisibility on the space that it apparently wishes to capture.
In the direct confrontation between that which we identify as real and that which seems to be unreal to us, and
more recently as virtual, there is, in our mediation among these three enormous blocks that can perceive a
symbology centred on the painting and drawing, a totality that is difficult to dissociate in its real and non-real
parts; true and false. This exhibition presents a set of paintings and drawings on paper with the central theme of
landscapes, spaces built out of vegetable and geological elements, among others, and which have no more
obvious relationship among them. These elements are painted one by one, disconnected from a formal continuity
that would be expected from earthly geographies, with the whole set forming an image with approximations to
the simultaneously suspended and somewhat atmospheric nature that surrounds it and transports it from the
ground to the centre of the painting. In the paintings the compositions are made up using traditional methods,
while in the drawings Joćo Queiroz introduces the line by means of furrows cut into wax that has previously been
spread over the surface of the paper. In the paintings there is a search for chromatic effects through the
conjugation of colours and shapes that lead us into open spaces, with it being susceptible for easily recognisable
natural environments to be brought into them; in the drawings, a monochrome quality highlights a set of
procedures on the surface of the paper, providing a more material dimension to each of the works.
The painting emerges as a process of capturing the occasional and successively random deforming of reality,
something that increases the possibilities of freeing our imagination in order to be able to act creatively on that
we observe. In this manner we may consider ourselves to be an active part of the reality carried, which comes to
us through the visual suggestions that each work transmits to us. We are the observers of a surface that we
cannot abandon and that we are only able to look at coherently when we place ourselves on the outside, feeling it
in a perspective that is exterior to us. They are landscapes that ask to be inhabited, so we should see them as the
product of pure imagination, which is not an artifice in the sense that all the elements it presents may exist
individually. We are therefore eternally on the outside of each work and we are simultaneously an integral part,
which enjoys the privilege of perceiving its superb forms. We often confuse our apprehensions with the
configurations and spectrums represented by Joćo Queiroz, which seem to be more insinuated than built, and for
that reason are unfinished in the main, leaving us in an excellent position to interpret them. In contrasting the
paintings with the drawings and the shapes used in each of them, we may possibly see that there is a very
intimate relationship between the two approaches: the painting and the drawing stand as the counterpoint to
each other, the face and its reverse. While in the case of the paintings the forms are born out of the conjugation of
the lines established by the colours and by the movement of unions among them, in the drawings one only sees
the appearing of successive strokes or lines engraved in the wax, without there being a concern to establish any
kind of chromatic game or combination of colours. If, through a process of projection onto canvas, we could
superimpose the drawings and the paintings, we would perhaps obtain a third dimension given to us through a
mixture of colours from one with the lines and edges of the others. The drawing could then be considered as a
sort of skeleton or linear exploration that is then composed on another, more pictorial level through the use of
colour.
This exhibition proposes a set of images that break with the principle of factuality, that acknowledge the need for
death as the last of the orders of the aesthetics of representation. The fiction contained in the works exhibited
breaks out from those so unreal spaces and contaminates everything around it, influencing and interfering with
what surrounds us. Nothing has become different, nor become liable to be detected from the landscapes that are
intended to be fixed and on which all the experiences lived out by the artist and by all those who observe them
have apparently been based. In thinking we are establishing intense monologues with what we are seeing,
mediating concordances and discordances; we are relativising and accepting the losses in the communications
and in the transmission of the intuitions that we carry out, acknowledging differences between the face and the
reverse, between words and facts, and between plastic artifices and the reality of the things that are the
fundamental elements that support our lives. It was easy to envisage the future imagining a day when technology
might free humanity from all of its existential weight, but present reality is increasingly inundated with
information, and this apparently libertarian dream has been turning into an immense nightmare. Something has
gone wrong in this process of capturing the real and then going on to imagine new future forms. In spite of
everything, we believe that all imaginary forms connected to are solutions that are much more benign in their
consequences that the problems of freedom announced by technological development.
TRANSLATION: DAVID ALAN PRESCOTT
