EXERCICES OF THE EYE


Circumstances that are irrelevant for this context have drawn me to the painting of Deolinda Fonseca, of which I have been writing about in the chronicles of her exhibitions, whenever I get news from Denmark, where her work takes place.

Whenever I get news with new images, it is time to look at them and ask, as if addressing an undefined person, and not looking at any specific work: What do we ask of a painting? What can we expect from a pictorial object? What does the painting provide us? Although these questions are rhetorical, they underline the central position of painting in the cultural dynamics of today, the resistance of an artistic communication model that is often exposed to rejection and is frequently condemned. These questions consolidate the dialogic substance in Deolinda Fonseca’s painting, and all paintings in general, by also questioning the spectator. (The dialogue is fake, because the questioner expects no answers, he finds them himself, if he is able to see them.) This conception of dialogue demonstrates that the art of painting, despite possibly being poetry, only speaks through echoes of color, reverberations and scintillations of light, and through the formalism that we recognize from the lifestyle of the world of art. Those and other comparisons are of supreme importance to Deolinda Fonseca – painting as music; filling the canvas like a note paper; painting as if writing.

Painting subsists as an artistic practice after an extremely long journey, after many announced deaths and an equal amount of resurrections. The permanent practice of this form of artistic expression is made even more difficult when entangled in a long tradition, in a grammar of historical content, and in a scenario of cult-figures which seem to suggest that the destiny of painting has already been consummated, and that denying it or leaving it alone would certainly be easier.

But to painting, difficulties are an old companion. It has survived periods of agitation and provocative intervention which attempted to prove that all ideas had abandoned the territory of painting, leaving behind only a trace of knowhow – hand and gesture – and the track of the eye. It has survived those periods, who insisted that authentic thought had drifted away from the territory of painting, and that the only remaining quality in it was its handmade character, and the idea of an object ready to change property and therefore obtain, in the hands of a collector, its correspondent decorative status. And yet painting resisted all this.

When I see the work of Deolinda Fonseca, which is what, interests me at this moment, these are some of the questions that come to my mind. I try to detect whether I will continue to observe it with curiosity and interest, wishing to unveil its origins, and patiently verifying the small details that make it develop but, fundamentally, I try to detect the presence of what they have tried to extract from this language: idea and thought; expression and sense of form; representation, presentation and presentification; suggestion, transfiguration and abstraction; tension and limits of space; movement or absence of it; beauty, tragedy, sense of humor, signs of life, narrative or mere sensations, questions, hesitations; light and obscurity; diurnal and nocturnal; and time (because, in painting, there are many times, with different durations and qualities: one of maturation and definition of the concept, one of actual execution, of a life reflected in the work, and one of the history of art).

When I observe the painting of Deolinda Fonseca and find all this, this abundance of signals, this density of propositions, this massive actuation, I do it based on what I see, based on the clues that the painter supplies, in other words, the paintings she exhibits. By calling them clues, I recognize the exiguity and grandiosity of the painting - exiguity, because in its physical surface, there isn’t too much space; and grandiosity, because this tiny space contains a whole world; exiguity because it gives us possibility to see only a fraction of whole concept of painting: and grandiosity, because we know that, in order to get to this fraction, much has been left behind, much has been lost, and much has been abandoned. Only someone that lives in a space and time of freedom is capable of painting without ever fearing to erase it all and start over, and create surprise.

The artist makes us take part in an endless motion of entering and exiting the painting, expanding our vision beyond infinity or drowning it in an abyssal aperture of space and light; or on the contrary, retracts our vision to a position in front of the structural elements, pushing the canvas in our direction; or, even, makes us hover above the surface of the canvas, captivated by the dilution of the brush strokes and its contradictory gestures.
The paintings of Deolinda Fonseca are synthesized in these three movements that together configure three worlds: one that planes over the painting itself, another that drifts away towards it, and another that exists over here. Can we, us observers, get lost through our eyes?

The question “Until when can we speak about painting?”, which appeared in other words in the beginning of this text, will always be an interesting question, because the provocation it contains, implies that the way we see, we painters and observers, renovates itself. It is remarkable that there still exists a domain where the eye can come and go, enclosing itself in the painting like a universe with its own values and, at the same time, can open itself to what it contains and transcends, in a perpetual exercise.

Laura Castro
September, 2007

Represented in Portugal by
SÃO MAMEDE GALERIA DE ARTE
www.saomamede.com