Errant Reason

by Luiz Eduardo Meira de Vasconcellos

In the path Loio-Pérsio bequeathed to painting, as a realm constantly reconfigured by the very act of painting, there are three main lines whose tensions and dissonances go hand in hand with the unperturbed creation of a reversible relationship between colour and composition that might very well account for the uniqueness of his work in the last sixty years of Brazilian art. As is the case in Physics, this reversibility is the mark of a system that throughout all of its phases remains in a state of near-equilibrium; it helps us to define the parameters of the pictorial question the artist poses, most significantly in a series of paintings from the late 1980s called Esgrafitos (Sgraffiti). These paintings assail the gaze gradually, by transforming patterns or scenes into a recursive process: the gaze moves from the composition, made up of dots, spaces, and -- above all -- lines, to colours that waver between transparent and opaque, rough and smooth, shimmering and static, only thence to return, by way of rhythm and harmony, to the path covered by the elements set forth diachronically, until eventually circling back to the colours, which overtake the space enclosed by the canvas as they disperse into the short-lived experiences of perception.

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The first of the three main lines, the one most commonly acknowledged by the artist’s critics and by those who recognize the value of his work, takes the form of an unshakeable search for coherence and formal rigour. Had this search not been a constant in Loio-Pérsio’s life, countless incidents that drove away any number of interested viewers might have been avoided, and his work would certainly have been more widely known and appreciated. By the same token, however, the quiet place wherein one beholds the kind of rumination that allows one to depart without moving would not have existed. The insistence on understanding things better than anybody else can be a damper on dialogue: as enlightening and productive as it can sometimes be, it also encourages the urge not to back down in the face of whatever stands in the way.

In referring to the two crises his work experienced in the latter part of the 1950s – the first was linked to a figurative styled with expressionist roots, whose solutions would involve the adherence to a critical realism or the destruction of a still incipient path, while the second had to do with the so-called ‘informal’ abstract style evident in his 1960 show at the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art and for that very reason placed shoulder to shoulder with the first stirrings of the Neo-Concrete movement – Loio-Pérsio defended his return to a style of painting that strove for self-respect with his rejection of ‘an antiseptic art trivialized by the golden ratio and by black and white’. At this stage of his career, to key for Loio-Pérsio was to refrain from ‘reducing art to forms and mathematical formulas’. Form -- which for him was not necessary but contingent – led him to struggle with the ‘ongoing contradiction inherent to things,’ this being the reason he did not take refuge in ‘pure forms, which are only ideally pure.’ His painting was about ‘forms that tend to fall apart or to come together and ‘form’ themselves’.1

Still in 1960, Loio-Pérsio won the Gold Medal at the Inter-American Biennial in México, and he was the youngest artist in group show that inaugurated the Giovanna and Alfredo Bonino Gallery in Rio de Janeiro, alongside Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Cândido Portinari, Alfredo Volpi, Milton Dacosta, Djanira da Mota e Silva, Antônio Bandeira, Aldemir Martins, Oswaldo Goeldi, Lygia Clark, and Fayga Ostrower. He remained nevertheless open to being moved by painting as an ‘autonomous reality’ in which ‘all intentions (be they religious, political, ethical, practical or scientific) could be treated as disposable appendages’.

The second of the three main lines is characterized by a renewed isolation during which Loio-Pérsio lived in several Brazilian cities (Curitiba, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, and Vitóra) and twice in Europe. This second main line is defined by his reflections on the pictorial tradition of his country; much as this tradition had by then distanced itself from a ‘nationalist’ art, it remained nevertheless obedient to conventions that reflected dominant aesthetic norms. He enquired into what, in painting, might correspond to the ‘civilization of the tropics’ that would supposedly have been brought about by the Modernist movement in the 1920s, by the French Artistic Mission that arrived in Brazil in 1816, and, by extension, by the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco between 1630 and 1654. As evidence of his opposition to this interpretation of Brazilian art’s supposed evolution or maturation we can cite – among other things – Loio-Pérsio’s claim that ‘artists, including those who consider themselves revolutionaries in one sense or another, are far from grasping the social and political import of their own professional activity’,2 made when he became the first president of the Brazilian Association of Professional Creative Artists in 1977, and the title of his last solo show, Always Brazil, at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes and at the Anna Maria Niemeyer Gallery, both in Rio de Janeiro, in 2001.

Gonzaga Duque’s essay, ‘A pintura no Brasil colônia’ (‘Painting in Colonial Brazil’), published in the 1 April 1900 edition of the journal Brasil-Portugal, helps us to understand the relevance of studying and publicizing artistic currents that do not follow the course laid out by hegemonic opinion – in Brazil’s case, this means currents independent of foreign cultural influences. In his survey of several pioneering Brazilian painters of the eighteenth century, who were by virtue of their dates unaffected by the influence of those who swelled the ranks of the French Artistic Mission, Duque not only locates the Church at the centre of the colony’s spiritual life, he also showed that studies of the use of colour were not necessarily tied to the impact of the luxurious natural world that so amazed the European travellers who described it most fully, especially in the course of the nineteenth century. The power of the colonial ‘school’ of painting is manifest, not in the predominance of greens and blues, colours that do justice to the boundless vitality of virgin forests and to the stark luminosity of sky and sea, in the presence of which the ‘retina is injured’ and, detached from its ‘absorbent properties’, ‘contracts in pain,’ but in the dazzling effects of ochres and yellows and in the range of tones from the soil to wilted leaves. Artist like José de Oliveira, João de Sousa, Manuel da Cunha, Raimundo da Costa e Silva, Leandro Joaquim and José Leandro de Carvalho were members of a community that had to deal with the arrogance and heavy-handedness of the colonizer’s authoritarianism. That did not stop them, however, from using the ‘liturgical pomp’ of religious services, the ‘architectural embellishments’ of the churches, and even the clothing and jewellery worn by those who frequented those places, as incentives to shape an ‘imitative aptitude’ that went beyond the boundaries that had defined them.3

The third of the main lines in Loio-Pérsio’s life, finally, was a kind of sombre, reflective companion to his career. It runs throughout his texts and lectures, in which debates the artist’s place in the world, a question that punctuates his introductions to his shows in museums, cultural centres and galleries. Even if the shows were few in number – as might have been expected given declarations like, ‘I only show my paintings when I feel they have something to say’ – we can nevertheless see that Loio-Pérsio’s career was beset by a permanent and combative negotiation between his ideals and the public exposure of the fruits of his creativity. ‘So the artist doesn’t always paint and exhibit when he wants to, and sometimes he paints and exhibits when he doesn’t want to, because his inner need does not automatically coincide with practical demands; this becomes all the more true as the art business grows unchecked.’4

Persistence, reemergence, and self-affirmation: these are the three milestones that punctuate the path traced by Loio-Pérsio’s pictorial quest. They do not, however, compose a map that could be consulted to pinpoint the artist’s subscription to any of the dominant or polemical tendencies of Brazilian art in the last sixty years. An artist who insists on maintaining and protecting his area of interest recognizes the importance of departing the scene so as to withdraw into a self-searching that does not shrink from the head-on confrontation with failure. During the last four years of his life, spent in a studio in Petropolis and an apartment in Copacabana, Loio-Pérsio produced not only a number of works and at least 150 studies that summarize and clarify the line of his painting, but also a good many manuscript pages in which he attempts to synthesize his views on art. He was concerned with preserving a minimal body of work, now looked after by his children, for he thought that would encourage documentation. He knew that once the storm had blown over, the rivers that draw their power from the land from which they arise would continue flowing in search of their time.

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Beginning in the late 1980s, one sees in Loio-Pérsio’s work an ever more intense emphasis on the most minimal elements of form, especially the line, which led him away, albeit unintentionally, from the questions that were most directly linked to drawing, as the other face of the art of painting. The attentiveness to maintaining the work’s subordination to its composition led the artist to turn colour into a substance whose source is not only the harmony that reigns over different shades, but also the tension between rarefaction and thickness, grit and satin, expansion and retraction. Some of the most important paintings from this period are reduced to lines that emerge and converge with the predominant colour covering the entire support. The simultaneous perceptual experience of these components was played out on two fronts. The first revealed a new dimension – not of depth but of time. Linear movement, duration, interval, and, by extension, process are possible ways of abstracting what is always at play on the surface of the painting. Perception resumes a cyclical mode on the second front, in which the return to colour reveals nuances and gradations, and the underpainting or background stands out as the foundation of those elements that were accepted from painting’s common heritage. It is in building on this heritage that each artist not only interprets the times he lives in, but also trains himself to remain alert and take full advantage of what he has made his trade.

Hence the reason for making the reversibility of colour and composition that came to characterize Loio-Pérsio’s work in the late 1980s the common ground for the selection of works for this exhibition. In a broad sense, this makes it possible to put Loio-Pérsio’s work on a par with the Concrete and Neo-Concrete tendencies in Brazilian art, as well as with the singular answers which, by cutting across different groups and movements, brought to the fore a number of quite specific pictorial issues, among them the ones explored by Milton Dacosta, Alfredo Volpi, Ione Saldanha and Mira Schendel.

Loio-Pérsio’s paintings Algarve (2000) and Big Red (Gardens) (2001) and the studies for them, done on a 1:10 scale, show that the reversibility we have been discussing can only be achieved in the painting itself, and must therefore be regarded as a special way of dealing with pictorial questions, one that makes at least three assertions possible: (1) an artist’s points of arrival shed light, above all, on the work of those who affect him; (2) art can only be revitalized if it acknowledges the place it is derived from; and (3) a work’s full realization does not negate the brevity of the moment that sustains it.

Both of the studies in question are primarily red, with a design of three lines in one and four in the other. In the latter, the lines, of another colour, float on a reddish rectangular surface without reaching the margin; only one touches the upper border. In the former, the three lines run the length of the surface: the most remarkable thing about them is their sinuosity, with the lines unfolding as if unaware of their starting or their endpoints. For the canvases, however, Loio-Pérsio not only added a new line, he also changed the predominant colour of one of them, spurning reds in favour of a mixture of light greys and whites with small, delicate concentrations of greens. He thus replaces what would otherwise be an imposing reddish vibration with an ambience that is simultaneously ethereal and peaceful, one where the lines, now painted in different colours, evolve through the interplay of presence and absence. In following them the eye does not move beyond the canvas: on the contrary, the canvas points the eye once again toward the mists of colour that shimmer with the energetic fervour of restraint.

Returning to Loio-Pérsio’s added lines: in Algarve, the fourth line, which enters and departs the painting through the lower right side of the canvas, concentrates and twists the outline created by the others by inverting the direction in which the composition seems to be moving while at the same time sharpening the sense of a circular motion abstracted from the passing of time. In Big Red (Gardens), a white line wanders around the edges of the composition, outlining four small areas. This line not only reinstates the complementary relationship between the green lines and the rose-red surface, it also adds a mysterious monologue to the undulation hinted at by the two places where the three green lines intersect. This monologue lengthens the duration of its silent, imposing presence.

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There is a reason that errs, repeating itself as it evolves, going astray in an effort to articulate the desire at its source. It is transitory and indecisive: ephemeral, it changes from one thing to another, incessantly skimming the edge of each and every thing it is sensible to. It fluctuates and trembles and sometimes flows through spaces that have been torn asunder, trying to ascertain their interrelation. One acknowledges that errant reason has no stopping place or pre-established route from which to hold forth, that it finds – beneath the intentions of whatever moves it or of the impulses that share its feelings – the material from which it composes the cartography of the bottomless field in which it moves, rather than faithfully tracing what was already there waiting to be discovered.

Standing before Loio-Pérsio’s paintings, one sees the in-between reason and sentiment, though without detecting, or defending, any organizing principles that could position his paintings in relation to artistic movements that have monopolized the attention of critics, curators, and other agents of the art ‘system,’ as well as national and foreign cultural institutions that aim to protect, stimulate, and guide the history of Brazilian art. In his work, formal inquiry takes into account the aporias between creative intent and technical mastery. It is no coincidence that the uninterrupted habit of studying, drawing, even of observing, only finds its true justification by becoming, in painting that self-exiles with each canvas, the sign (spontaneous, enthusiastic and joyful, let us not forget to point out) through which one builds one’s own, unique voice, capable of reflecting what one is really is.

Translated by Ken Krabbenhoft

Footnotes:

1 Loio-Pérsio, ‘Duas palavras’ (‘Two Words’), in Loio-Pérsio: Paintings [exhibition catalogue] (Rio de Janeiro: Galeria Anna Maria Niemeyer, 1986) n.p.

2 Ibid, p. 20

3 Luís Gonzaga Duque Estrada, ‘A pintura no Brasil colônia’ (‘Painting in Colonial Brazil’), in Júlio Castañon Guimarães and Vera Lins (org.), Outras impressões: crônica, ficção, crítica, correspondência, 1882-1910 (Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa, 2011) 289-91. Duque Estrada’s piece is from 1900.

4 Loio-Pérsio, ‘Duas palavras’.