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Nuno Medeiros |
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A Theatre of Cruelties
Eduardo Paz Barroso
Nuno Medeiros (Paris 1970) builds his plastic work from a nucleus of concerns with a clear symbolic significance. The main characteristic of his approach arises from the evocative power of the vocabulary he has persistently been constructing.
His works bear witness to the re-valorisation of a mythical attitude that grants them an up-to-date civilisational stance. It is above all in this aspect that the possibility of seeing this painting as a theatre of cruelties finds its support. Nuno Medeiros’s painting may thus shifted, in the field of the image, to a disruptive neighbourhood of theatrical and cinematographic scenes; the drawing up of a territory, with its furrows of solitude, its values and its obsessions – in short, of the magnetic field of images which appear to us with a mythical aura. Personal elements, day-to-day objects, touched by a ritual intimacy that condenses their eroticism.
A succession of exhibitions held in 2000, 2001 and 2002 (at the S.Bento Gallery, in Lisbon) provides the explanation for a set of symbols that are constantly re-organised in Medeiros’s work. In some works these symbols meet incomplete figures, icons from the history of painting, such as Velasquez, for example. In other works they refer to stories by the Portuguese writer and poet Mario Cesariny, and they distort the narrative sense, giving rise to what we may call dyslexia of the visible. A game of presences and absences, a manipulation of the explicit and of the implicit revealing energy of desire. We are then aware of an artistic expression corrupted, or threatened, by the repetition of unexpected elements, such as the male figure/character present in a set of paintings from 2000.
Nuno Medeiros’s formal and thematic coherence easily explain why identical presuppositions may be found in the present exhibition. Out of place, surreal-inspiring images, possessed with a hidden meaning that justifies them and bails them out: the mythical exegesis to which the work remains faithful. A patient curiosity is demanded of the spectator, which is fundamental to drawing up a mental (and sentimental) path.
Another aspect that is obvious in the most recent works is inspired in previous works, from 2001, in which the artist divided the surface of the canvas into sections, in an analogy with the graphic language of cartoon strips. Then, as now, the work denotes an effect of differentiation. Difference and repetition (to use a famous formula from contemporary philosophy) set up a particularly productive field that may help us to penetrate this difficult and even aggressive universe.
All symbolic function is a function of remission, as everything that allows the interpretation and realization of an indirect meaning is symbolic (as Umberto Eco points out). In Nuno Medeiros’s work there is deliberate symbolic redundancy. For the realization of this indirect meaning, which is fundamental for the work of communication, it is important to stress the place of the artist within the immensity of the codes. The moment and the secret reasons at the origin of his symbolic appropriation.
The Cross of David, the fish, the bull, the blade (of the knife and of the scissors), the bird and the mirror are recurring elements in many canvases. They may be seen as symptoms (including in the psychoanalytical understanding of the term) of an artistic subject implicated in the crisis of representation affecting the contemporary world.
The set of works that makes up the present exhibition, in the Sala Maior, prolongs these issues that seem to form the nucleus of the work carried out by Nuno Medeiros. Yet one should also stress his treatment of new materials, which by their nature emphasise the symbolic aspect now analysed. The applying of oil on an offset plate canvas, (Confrontation I) is a clear example of this. The areas of text engraved on the plate, the painting of a masked man, the pose he adopts and the whole sensation of neutrality being unleashed from the “background”, contrast with the contained energy of a body about to be released at any moment. The same plastic process in Ulysses’s Sleep, reinforced by a dramatics alluding to violence. A light-bulb, a chair of impeccable and anonymous design, establish a relationship between industrial products, consumption and the mechanics typical to an industrialisation wounded by the naked and harassed body. Although not being open to immediate ideological speculation, the drama of disenchantment hangs over these works; a sort of humble suffering that only art may save. One once again feels the primordial message that obsesses the artist and with which he motivates the spectator. A silence without the innocent takes hold of this absurd reality, because the human condition is still absurd according to some of the cultural references called up. The bull’s head or the umbrella once more coexists as displaced symbols; they query a tradition; they whisper the power of secular fantasies.
Previously some literary implications of this universe still under construction were referred to. Bataille could well have been one of them, given the association between eroticism and death that is also insistently evoked here. Too many things and characters out of place in incomprehensible scales and proportions grant a unique strength to this artistic proposal. Francis Bacon is an intended reference hovering over many of these works. Thus there is the recurrent cruelty of this universe. Not so much a gratuitous cruelty, but more terrible and necessary cruelty that things exercise over us. In this sense, the paintings displayed here stress a confrontation of painting with objects and bodies, with stainless steel plates, with fragments of a personal vocabulary, giving rise to sequences similar to strips of film. A film that is incomplete and cut by scissors, in an allusion to the importance of editing. Which is probably responsible for the hallucinatory facet also achieved by this painting at certain moments. One sees things that suddenly increase and decrease in size; others that plunge headlong from the surface of the painting like stones cast into the darkness of a well. And, yet again, the traces of an oneiric experience leave the strong pungency of the subconscious in these paintings.
But nothing is definitively interpreted; particularly in the case of this artistic research from which there is certainly a great deal still to be expected, and which for this very reason deserves to be followed attentively. Meanwhile, pain and pleasure seem to definitively take hold of this discourse, which feeds off timeless hermetic Knowledge and reminds us that we live in an age of predators.
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