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Lisbon - 2002 Fiat Lux: The dark new paintings of João Salema Gradually over the past couple of years, the work of João Salema has been divesting itself of the formal and iconographic props that previously sustained her work. She had leant heavily on the already-given – readymade images culled from photographs or illustrations – bringing them into the visual field in order to effect upon them variously distorting operations (overlaps, elongation, compression, flattening, anamorphosis). With these devices, a sense of the artifice of all representation was played off against a rebellious consciousness of the materiality of paint itself. Because there was such a palpable involvement (whether delight or struggle) with the material, Salema’s work sustained a tension between the ‘loss of aura’ of her source image (photograph or illustration) and the infusion of presence ushered in by the auratic trace of the artist’s hand, the vestiges of her dealings with the medium. A radical shift occurred in the works exhibited at Módulo in Lisbon in 1999, where all distortion is abandoned and all surface complexity shed. Painted on canvas or on paper, tiny images appear singly and starkly upon monochromatic grounds, deliciously coloured and, in the case of the canvases, painted with scarcely contained delight. The vestiges of impasto and the trace of brushmarks (like the traces of an icing-spatula on the surface of a cake) is what remains here of Salema’s earlier struggles with both composition and material. The images which float, unanchored and decontextualised, upon these grounds are painted tonally within a monochromatic range (black and white or sepia and white) and thus frankly confess to their photographic provenance. Trapped in the solitude of their brightly coloured grounds, often fragmentary or incomplete, these figures bear the melancholy mark not only of the fragment (mourning, as it were, for a lost whole) but also of pastness, whether in the ‘retro’ style of the clothing or indeed of the rendition of the figure itself. The photographic sources of these figures, are diverse: family albums, movies, portraits, newspaper photographs, houses, animals. Imbued with a fascinating banality, these motifs are compelling for their emotional flatness and their fragmentary nature, their decontextualisation: things in a void. The poignancy and poetry of these works stems from their radical simplicity, and paradoxically too, from a certain maladroitness in the figuration. In the new works now on show, ten uniformly sized and untitled canvases, the artist evinces a further disciplining of the wayward or aleatory: all traces of maladroitness have disappeared. The grounds are painted a deep, silky black. Salema has chosen canvas of a fine weave, and the thin application of layer upon layer of black acrylic paint results in a highly polished and resistant surface – a surface, in other words, that resists any attempt at being pierced by the spectator’s gaze, and that equally resists the metaphors of both window and screen. The fine grid of the weave of the canvas remains subtly present in the finished surface which is thus rendered an impermeable monochromatic matrix. This minimalist bid to erase difference and accident – to erase, indeed, signs of facture itself – is a far cry from the strategies of Salema’s previous works, with their insistent sensuality, their reminder of the presence of the artist’s hand. All the more shocking, then, the appearance of the tiny individual head, floating upon each black ground, fragmentary but nonetheless literalised by its strong allusion to a photographic referent. Salema has stripped these paintings of narrative allusion, of spatial or temporal specificity, of compositional complexity. She has cut away and pared down, reduced the visibility of brushstroke, disencumbered herself of colour, shed the sensuous, the random, the incidental. There is no allusion left to the deictic, the pointing to either thing or event; no ‘this is’ or ‘that was’, those twin devices which Barthes identified with photography but but which are present, too, in different forms of verbal or cinematic narrative. We are left now with the bare bones of painting itself, honed down, polished, and pitted against the bare bones of a photographic referent – the portrait head. These heads, stone-like in their expressionlessness, are drawn from photographs which appealed to the artist for their formal qualities (tonal contrast, frontal or profile placing) rather than any affective connotations they might provoke. In most instances, the structure of the head itself is merely implicit, and what we are presented with is simply a mask-like face. Minutely detailed in tiny knotted brushstrokes, revealed through a smoky chiaroscuro obviously indebted to photography, these ‘masks’ are painted in tones of deepest Vandyke brown oil paint over the black acrylic ground. Oil on acrylic, brown on black, they are never permitted to blend completely with the ground. Nevertheless, while in several of these paintings, the features are dramatically illuminated and remain clearly demarcated by tonal contrast, in others, the contrast is so toned down to a murky sfumato, that the image seems about to dissolve. The surface of the masks is troubled by a fine craquelé which threatens to swallow up the image altogether, though a deft and painterly illusionism keeps the image from dissolution. Though never entirely fusing, it is as though figure and ground are straining towards each other, towards the annihilation of the image itself, the collapse of figuration. If, then, João Salema’s earlier work had been characterised by a tension between what might be termed a post-modern self-consciousness of the image as always already constructed – already in representation – and a modernist affirmation of painting as painting, these recent works are marked by a new tension: that between the symmetry and harmony of the chiselled features straining to manifest themselves as form, and the dissolution of form itself into darkness. Salema phrases it as the relationship between ‘light’ and ‘mud’. The faces are illuminated by a phosphorus flash even as they threaten to disappear into shadow. On the one hand, then, light which not only reveals but also creates form – light with all its metaphysical overtones (lux) and its physical capacity to make visible (lumen); on the other hand, mud as the primeval matter which precedes form and to which all form, in turn, tends; but also mud as metaphorised by paint itself. This tension may be phrased as the age-old conflict between the classical tendency to order and the romantic tendency to dissolution. But to put it thus is, in a sense, to lose the point. It seems more useful to phrase it as the pitting of implacable beauty on the one hand against the informe on the other. If Salema’s previous body of work struck a sustained note of melancholy, resonating with the strains of mortality (the solitude of the figure seems the more poignant for its placement on a sweetly coloured ground, the bodily gestures mutely directed towards no-one), here, paradoxically and despite the blackness of the work, death seems to be cancelled out. If
there exists an intrinsic and always implicit bond between beauty and
death, or between the apprehension of beauty and mourning, this is because
the beautiful is inevitably transient. By the same token, one might
say that all form tends, finally, to its own dissolution. It was Georges
Bataille who first adduced the formless (l’informe), giving
it meaning not so much as the opposite of form (as death
might be the opposite of life), but rather, as an operation:
‘it is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term
which serves to bring things down [déclasser] in the world.’
The conflation of meanings in the verb ‘déclasser’
– to debase and to declassify – is not besides the point:
if classification is the expression of a will to order, declassification
is the activity of entropy. This declassification or abasement is a
deathly reminder, just as it is against death that beauty asserts itself,
however fleetingly: beauty as sublimation, the ideal which (symbolically)
substitutes ‘all perishable psychic values’. These ten canvases
by João Salema hold in fragile equipoise these two strains: the
pull towards beauty, the pull towards dissolution. Caught between a
poised and crystalline formal perfectionism and the abject, the works
are most haunting where this dissolution seems imminent, where form
seems about to give way entirely to ground, and light to matter. Lisbon, November 2001
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