Painting as a Noun
By Guilherme Bueno
One of the biggest problems we encounter when discussing the current state of painting consists of
shifting froma generalizing analysis to an objective viewpoint. Objective, to be read here in the literal
sense of the word.Therefore, speaking of painting in its material sense is not restricted to an approach
rooted in the still-necessary critical questioning of the boundary between modernity and postmodernity, the touchstone of which, as a rule, has been to challenge the striking metalinguistic
character of 20th century production. Rather, when we make use of this “material objectivity” of
painting today we emphasize something elementary yet important to say – it’s condition can only be
ascertained upon direct contact with an oeuvre and an inquiry into our experience that the works
provoke.
In a nutshell, Painting fortunately still depends on paintings to be less fixated on the transcendental
search for its definition than broadening its repertoire of works. This foreword is particularly relevant to
understanding the foundations of Paulo Laport’s art. Our initial impression, intriguing in itself, is that of
how modern his paintings look in his methodical perspective of the constitutive physical terms, even
when purposefully placed at their limit. Let us consider one example: what is the boundary that
separates objectivity and subjectivity when dealing with the notion of scale? Such notion is actually
decisive insofar as it is installed in the work on three axes: the verticality of the canvas, the thickness of
its chassis and of its layers of paint, thus creating a thick painting mural and the need to breathe when
the works are fitted to the architectonic space. However, returning to the problem, the fact is that these
paintings, although passing for a modern oeuvre, are emphatically contemporary. That might be a minor
issue here, considering the relative indifference, or perhaps even discretion, in being tied to
classifications of such order. Nonetheless, this unstable boundary is active in its capacity to tear up each
component of the pictorial field, once again exposing here the general categories that structured an
auto-referential practice of certain modern painting to their ordinary test. Consider again the projection
of the chassis and the extension of the painted plane to the sides: they simultaneously emulate and
break from both the centripetal organization of the painting’s elements and the frontality that erstwhile
underlay the famous (and now infamous) planarity. This frontal plane, however, is not resolved due
merely to lateral displacement; it is also placed in friction against itself – the successive layers turn the
support almost into a floor on which the paint is embedded. It would be valid to technically describe
these works as “painting on painting” (as we usually talk of oil on canvas, oil on paper, etc.), also in
virtue of the other implicit meanings; painting that speaks about and is made on its own history.
Ironically, this could actually be the only quasi-metaphor (I add quasi to make it clear that operating on
history is neither incorporeal nor foreign to the concrete world) at stake.
The singular feature of note is that of painting being emphasized as a noun. In effect, this signals its
difference compared to modern painting, which rejected allegories, and surreptitiously resorted to
adjectives: it needed to be abstract, expressive, expressionist, concrete, lyrical, essentialist, and
whatever else it wanted. It ended up resorting to other vehicles to paradoxically demonstrate its
autonomy. In Paulo’s works everything is contained precisely to “calibrate” the presence of the painting:
the trajectory of the brush and of the paint on the canvas cannot be called gestural or austere; it is not
neutral, rather it is anti-expressive. The resulting mesh is not designed, but to call it spontaneous would
be to commit the negligence of looking for, outside the geometry, an inconvenient emotiveness in it.
That same mesh actually reinforces the self-unfolding relationship between the painting and the space
that it simultaneously occupies and founds. Speaking freely to Newman (the zip) and Mondrian (not only
the grid, but the alignment of the brush strokes with the perpendicular mesh of the canvas), it mediates
the arrangement of one plane over another, citing its support in the painting. After all, this clash is felt at
every instant here – considering that these paintings are not completed immediately, but rather by the
comings and goings of the pictorial strands, whose viscosity or drying creates advances and retreats of
colouration, light and articulation within the painting. This painting of a plane only truly achieves this
condition after arduous and almost interminable sessions which always involve the threat of any slight
distraction putting everything to waste. This slow painting, in which respect is contradictory to the fastmoving modern world, requests of us a perception that I would not call introspective (which would
make it sound romantic), but rather immersive (i.e., it requires accurate attention under prolonged
exposition). And the greyish glow, on account of all this, forms the axis of these works.
The greyish tone is to Paulo’s painting what blue is to Cézanne. This arises from the way in which the
colour breaks its enclosure (as even when the local colour was abolished in impressionism, it still spread
out in an homogenous and, to a certain extent, segmented manner), creating an “atmosphere” in the
painting where a given colouration permeates throughout, even enabling a redistribution of weight and
hierarchy among the parts and between the figure and the background. To speak of greyish here,
however, is almost to resort to a conventional vocabulary merely to introduce the eye to the field to be
investigated. For at every point there are reverberations of countless other colours crossing the strata of
the painting, leaving us questioning whether colour really exists in these paintings. To examine this
problem in more detail, we can call on Pollock, Seurat, Matisse and Albers (and Newman again) to join
this dialogue. Pollock, for he, to a certain extent, reconfigured and updated the colour vs. colouration
confrontation both of Cézanne and of analytic cubism (as well as opening the way for painting without
design, determined in its own constitutive process); Seurat for colour obtained through fragmentation.
And finally, the trio of Matisse, Albers and Newman, on account of this new quality assumed by colour in
20th century art. In all three, colour not only gains autonomy, but also breaks the tonal scheme (in
Matisse with the admission of black as a colour, previously signalled by Courbet and Franz Hals, for
example) and with Newman in the corporeal dimension colour attains. Obviously citing three icons of
painting may sound pretentious here, or at least disconcerting, however it is precisely this almost
immobilizing weight of an eloquent past that compels the persistence of artwork, which must overcome
zealous respect and create before it strategies of conservation, renunciation, deviation or invention. To
place this in concrete terms in relation to Paulo’s paintings, it seems essential to understand the value of
this greyish not only as faithful to the colour vs. colouration antithesis, but also in the very hypothesis of
establishing grey as a colour, perhaps without even excluding its survival as a tone. In other words, the
grey/greyish here would be the way out, the decisive ultimatum for the enigma of how to speak of
painting without expunging colour, yet not allowing its sensuality to divert the attention to everything
else that painting also is. The supposed neutrality of the grey (and its tonal value has always been
exploited in this regard) was to produce gradual intermediations between elements of painting, thus
creating harmony between the part and the whole. Thus, to a certain extent it “tempered” the degree of
depth and projection of the painting in relation to the internal space of the canvas and that other space
which should (or should appear to) jump out from it; in general terms this was suggested in the “relief”
structure of renaissance painting, for example. The matter of grey-based adjustment was therefore to
reconcile the emphatic corporeality of the white with the deep retreats suggested by the black, thus
creating intermediary planes. In the case of Paulo’s greyish, this colour-tone suitably complements the
break from the classic dualities of colour vs. tone and colour vs. drawing, as it simultaneously fuses them
(witness how his paintings, once again like Pollock, have no design) and, if we consider again the
proposal of a painting which relies on itself as its support, we can see that this greyish almost literally
places (even in its corporeal constitution) this adjustment of planes and luminosities that control the
whole piece. It does not describe a mesh, the mesh is made within. Furthermore, still in relation to its
corporeal aspect which, to reiterate, is at once literal and autonomous (as at times it takes on the
support almost as a circumstance on which the painting “rests”), it also constitutes a luminosity that,
while at first glance depends on external rays of light, it equally stores the eruption of an internal
luminosity, which indeed comes from within and from behind the pictorial plane closest to jumping out.
Attempting to explain this in other words, there is a familiarity with Albers’ treatment of colour, the
final, most visible layer of which shone as a result of the numerous layers below that often closed,
blocked, or at least regulated the light coefficient emitted by the canvas (somewhat perceptible in the
German artist’s studies). Granting this new statute to grey has yet another meaning. If we think of it as
an equation, the enigma of a colour that is spatialized without resorting to latent sensuality. Grey is the
quintessential neutral colour. Hence it appears in these paintings as a non-emotive colour, a colour-noncolour, whose unusual “inexpressiveness” ends up now taken by indifference, now serving as a point of
support and “rest” for other intense zones. It seems to just expel colour from the painting, as if
removing what little the painting still holds of “accident”. However, this discreet and solidary colour that
joins the other parts that together form the painting, only works precisely when prolonged perception is
demanded as mentioned above, dissatisfied by the stereotypes of miraculous “immediate” perception
or of falsely mulled over – and somewhat theatrical – affectation of the pretentious expert. There is
something of a request for a time that, while not new, is another on behalf of the spectator. The
establishment of grey as a colour could signal, in terms of its minimal and contained qualities, the
affluence of a new hypothesis for painting. And as an hypothesis, it needs to be tested and ascertained.
In the next work to be initiated, painting by painting.