Painting without happenings
Apparently, nothing happens. This would be a fracture in the narrative condition that painting has exercised supremely. We have seen Giorgione observe lightning striking in vast landscapes, Gaspar Friedrich paint strange icebergs in an Antarctic environment, the city lights disappear in a deep, nocturnal blue of Whistler's, emptiness in Degas' ballets, solitude in Hopper's movie theatres and petrol stations, light fragmented through the window-frame in Eric Fischl, Ryman's and Newman's monochromes, Anselm Kiefer's metallic fields in gold and suffering. Nothing was happening and everything was said, cutting through, untimely.
Geraldo Marcolini follows such voids. He observes endless roads, alleys, trees, tunnels and cars on rainy days. But what actually happens? The image, according to Jacques Rancière, can be dedicated to the irrepresentable. In Marcolini's paintings, we can observe, as the aforementioned author so urges, that there are no more realities, only images. Such situations "join and disjoin the visible and its meaning." And we know that this is no simple operation. Photography is used as a reference, no longer opposed to the "colourful meat of painting". On the contrary, the material presence of the linen is demonstrated by rubber-coated concealments. And here, the painter plunges himself into repeating. There are grooves, checks and stripes that create a pictorialization not far off the technical reproducibility of machines.
Today, fractures of image supervene at every instant, in the tireless quest for greater resolution, in the expanding filmic element in more frames per second. And Marcolini engages these conditions, feigning technical-image, when superimposing a glued painting over the linen. He uses a device that blemishes the picture, not allowing archetypal brushstrokes. Where did the expression go? His tragic gestures? The allegorical subjectivity?
In Geraldo Marcolini's works, the painting comes about by proxy. Although manufactured, the pictorial gesture is annulled when cut through, contaminated by the action of the rubberized objects that prohibitively touch the fresh paint. An erasing gesture, a subversive gesture. But what can be done in the game of similarities? "The work of art is therefore that of playing with the ambiguity of similarities and the instability of dissimilarities, of operating a local redisposition, a unique recomissioning of the images in circulation."
There are some images that pass by indifferent to media circulation, precisely those, where, apparently, nothing happens. One need only walk around the streets, wandering, strolling and noticing everything that turns up. The priority of Marcolini's description is, therefore, a "visible that is not made seen", an uninterrupted spectacle, a before and an after the essay. In this emptiness, the pathos, the power between the "reason of the facts" and the "reason of the fiction" begins to occur, to be projected. There are never eloquent gestures, there are only fade outs, the film location, the environment after a crime, a lodging waiting for a guest.
The character from Breathless, a film by Jean Luc Godard, says to her lover "I close my eyes tight to make everything go black, but I can't do it. It's never completely black." The fate of the images is adherence to the happenings, photos subtitling the passing of the days in the newspapers, cheap novels, televised emotions. What for? And, so, you close your eyes. Nonetheless, the image starts to shake, like a flash, in high contrast. It exhibits and not always means. It's explained, but apparently, nothing happens. Geraldo Marcolini's paintings address this impregnation; images that appear, are presented, where the happening is just an opening and closing of the eyes.
Marcelo Campos, 2013