"Radio, live transmission/ Radio, live transmission". After Peter Hook’s bass solo leading the song intro to the vigorous drum beat of Stephen Morris, Ian Curtis’ somber and characteristic voice embodies the lyrics of Transmission, by Joy Division, in one of the highlights of British post-punk music of the late 1970s. In the video clip the somewhat monotone crowd flirts with a more engaged vibration, but is mimicked in the neon lights, regular haircuts and smart clothing throughout the scene. It is worth recalling that the São Paulo artist Fabio Flaks eternalized a shot of the band’s most famous song, Love Will Tear Us Apart, in the painting When Routine Bites Hard.
The industrial universe in ruins borrowed by Flaks, symbolic of a tormented fin-de-siècle, is not too far removed from the somewhat melancholic setting of the Transmission video. Both without doubt speak to the artwork of Geraldo Marcolini, from Rio de Janeiro state. In Transmission, his first solo in São Paulo and part of the Zip’Up project, at the Zipper Gallery, the artist brings landscapes loaded with this ashen state of mind, absent characters, straying deprived of meaning, a prevailing stillness.
The series exhibited in this show could be analyzed more closely as an investigation into landscape, produced under a sign of extended painting. However, Marcolini enjoys shuffling procedures, languages and influences. Whereas in the exhibition CMYK (2011), at the Cosmocopa gallery in Rio de Janeiro, bubble wrap was a kind of matrix for his pictorial experiments, today, in Transmission, rectangular and vertically-striped rubber surfaces serve as the atomic elements of the works. The process is not dissimilar to wood engraving, which brings to mind, in relation to the technique, the pessimistic vision of Oswaldo Goeldi (1895-1961). Applied to canvas, at times in large scale and in a patient work process (some of the paintings take up to a month to complete), the acrylic paint gains contours now in the form of stripes and grooves, at the expense of the granulated effect that resulted from the materiality of the bubble wrap. Thus, the pieces make cross references between painting, engraving and drawing.
But what is the origin of this emphasis on such static corners, anonymous scenes, intermediary places, noiseless happenings? There is a mix of capturing the banal through various sources – photographs of his own, images taken from the internet, frames from films, everyday records of old and modern-day publications and newspapers – and an attentive eye for the inexpressive, one of the engines of contemporary art. Whereas in recent Brazilian art Regina Parra, Rafael Carneiro and Paulo Almeida, for example, use painting as comment on a hypermediated society, where surveillance cameras feature as ever-present devices which silently build images, Marcolini opts for the creation of scraps of narratives, fragmented and lacking visual refinements which, in his case, would only lead to an undesirable virtuoso effect. “I try to make the selection process very intuitive, without rationalizing the motives”, he explains.
And the stripped-down, barely ostensible photographic language of a Wolfgang Tillmans, for instance, may echo in the multifaceted poetry of the Rio de Janeiro artist. In a world that is increasingly virtual and literally linked to the palm of the hand, Marcolini chooses low resolution as one of the triggers for his creative process. "In this universe, not only has the image lost body, but also the whole real itself seems to have volatilized, dissolved, been disembodied in a complete sensory abstraction" (1), warns Philippe Dubois in the early days of the touchscreen.
Works like Fade Out and Print Screen (titles that refer to trivial operations by post-production and printing tools) also lead to reflection on the particular urban situation we are living in. “If the need to go faster and save time, if the possibility of living in real time and at the speed of light change our bodily experience, then will we need to sacrifice the urban rhythm of yesterday? The inversion is indeed complete when passage gives way to real time experiences. [...] Contemporary urbanism is dual, ambiguous, since it privatizes and fragments, above all because it interconnects privileged places. [...] Proximity may be ignored when urban limits fall. The outside and inside are radically separated: we are outside or inside, urban experience, which indefinitely folds the inside and the outside, the outside and the inside, is as if it falls ill, immobilized before the risk of the shapeless” (2) writes Olivier Mongin in The Urban Condition.
Amid such an ambiguous and splintered condition, using low-fi tone transpositions – let us recall the original pages of matrix prints, super-8s, amateur videos, low definition B&W photocopies – Marcolini also courageously develops the defense of painting, with provocative elements that seem to poke fun at the blatant stalemate of the language. If the technological suffers from gaps in its high resolution transmission, chance and accident are not wiped from the artist’s pictorial creation. They live together, drift apart, cohabit and contaminate each other. “Painting may not be dead. Its vitality will only be tested after we are cured of our craze and our melancholy and start to believe again in our capacity to act in history: accepting once again our project of experiencing to the end, instead of swerving from it through increasingly elaborate defense mechanisms (this is very much to do with the craze and melancholy), and deciding our historic task: the tough task of bereavement. [...] Let us say simply that the desire of painting remains, and that this desire is not entirely programmed by the market, or subordinate to it: this desire is the only element that points to a future prospect of painting, that is, to a non-pathological bereavement” (3), states Yve-Alain Bois. Between bereavement and vitality, the stalemates and attitudes, the crises and epiphanies, the art of Geraldo Marcolini is not omissive and grants us a restless, conflicting, incongruent status. “And we could dance”, as Ian Curtis would sing.
Mario Gioia
(1) DUBOIS, Philippe. Cinema, Vídeo, Godard. São Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2004, p. 66
(2) MONGIN, Olivier. A Condição Urbana. São Paulo, Estação Liberdade, 2009, p.132 e 133.
(3) BOIS, Yve-Alain. A Pintura como Modelo. São Paulo, WMF Martins Fontes, 2009, p. 294 e 295.