The images overflow fleetingly
And we are naked before the living things.
What presence can ever meet
The impulse within us, endless,
To be all and to bloom in every flower?
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andersen
Obra Poética I
Caminho
The life story of an artist appears behind his work just like a watermark on paper, identifying the origins, attesting to the authenticity. If the past is brought to life, it is so in the effort to build a new paradigm, to provide a constant change in seeking progress. Everything changes all the time, time is relentless and identity, so persecuted, lies in the different layers of experiences. Artist Luis Coquenão, born in Angola and based in Vila do Prado (Braga), Portugal, has been building his artistic identity in the light of various influences.
They are two different worlds, one in dissolution, another being revamped, forming a network where cultures and realities are interconnected. Abstraction and figuration, spirituality and naturalism, tradition and novelty are the themes currently present in his work. On procedural and conceptual terms, it is closer to the movements coinciding with the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in the western world and to eastern art in general, as the artist himself puts it: "I seek a synthesis of all these assumptions, maintaining, however, the rural origins of my experiences ".
The exhibit Marca d´água (Watermark) presents fluid landscapes, pervaded by delicate color, subtle effects of the brush and textures that lead us to ponder the mysteries of nature. Coquenão paints in the squares as the embodiment of the missing plane where everything is inscribed. If, on the one hand, there is the discomfort of painting in a controlled fashion, on the other, the result is the release of the gesture, in a coherent result. Strongly influenced by Chinese philosophy and painting, Luis Coquenão creates his works with the certainty that nature exists both inside and outside of the observer. The changes and movements, endless and without boundaries, understood with emotion, are present in each of the exposed frames. In them we observe the light and shadows, the cold and the warmth of the day, the wind, the rain and the calm.
Just as the concept of landscape is imprecise, so are the landscapes that we see in watery and translucent paintings. They exist primarily in an interaction with the society which produced them, and which reproduces and transforms them. In this sense, Augustin Berque suggests that the landscape is the "matrix". But it is also a "mark" when it expresses a civilization, being possible to be described and inventoried. In human geography, the landscape has always been closely linked to culture, to the idea of visible forms on the surface of the earth. It is a "way of seeing", a way of composing and of harmonizing the external world in a "scene", in a visual unity. The term arose to indicate a new connection between human beings and their environment.
Another key element in Coquenão's work is color, which thus constitutes a language and, as such, requires learning and reflection to ponder the space. The dialogue on plastic experiences can broaden the field of artistic activity beyond the criation of an art work. Johannes Ittens, in his 1970 book Elements of Color, states that colors should be used as a carriage, a means of transport to develop the work. In modern art (and especially in contemporary art), the works carry a growing trend to play with the temporal experience of the observer himself, who is driven not only to contemplate, but also to participate.
As color fields, Coquenão develops an expanded relationship between the subject and the artwork. The color invades the senses, intoxicates and leads to a state of tension. Thus the viewer, with his own interests, individuality, and action impulses, will act on the work which, like any art form, is always constituted as something unfinished.
Color and abstract shapes have been the research subject of historical avant-gardes. In an activity without rules which flirts with the illusion of depth, pondering its limits and those of representation, abstraction removes the viewer from its passive, comfortable, contemplative condition. In a visual composition, Josef Albers, a pioneer of abstraction, compares color and music and explains: to hear it "depends on the identification of the intervals between tones, as well as on its placement and spacing"[1]. According to Albers, music has a one-way successive chronological sequence. In turn, colors "can be seen in any direction and at any speed. And, given its permanence, we can go back to it many times and in many ways"[2] . Luis Coquenão favors the traditional, the ink, the canvas, naturalism. He superimposes layers of paint, leaving his mark on the transparency of the process. Paints drip, form webs and fringes, frames and borders. Marks are left behind, at times clearer and brighter, at others darker and more obscure. There are no straight lines, no rigidity. Everything is smooth, whispers and suggests more than imposes. His work reveals the coherence, the learning which led the artist to conscious and mature choices. Like watermarks...
Isabel Sanson Portella [3]
May, 2015
1. ALBERS, Josef. A Interação da Cor. Translation of Jefferson Luiz Camargo. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2009, p. 66.
2. idem, p.44.
3. Isabel Maria Carneiro de Sanson Portella - Museologist and art critic, PhD and MS in History and criticism of art by Escola de Belas-Artes/UFRJ, Specialist in History of Art and Brazilian Architecture by PUC-Rio, Collection Researcher and Coordinator of Galeria do Lago - Contemporary Art of Museu da República/IBRAM/MinC.