A seeing that moves

One word — ahnungslos — challenges us. A German word that Roberto Calasso adopted in his book La Rovina di Kasch (1983) to tell us the condition in which the West finds itself. After millennia of a tumultuous history, we live «devoid of enchantment», or, in another way, without a shadow of sin, guilt or grace, but also without purpose, axis, meaning. To be modern is to live under the disenchantment of the world that merciless forces have brought to the surface. Art, or what will remain of it, is assumed to be a place where such disenchantment has sacrificial tones, the same that Calasso seeks to identify. Beauty, the greatest spell, will have to be eliminated. She is the sacrificial victim on this path of elimination and abrasion.

In the modern territory of progressive usury and symbolic dismissal, drawing and painting, in their mutual implication, seem to base their practices on the rework off of references. This redrafting affirms itself as a complex, polymorphic, ambiguous process, made up of dissensions. The crisis of representation, in this sense, is the expression and exegesis of this process. If we want to retain one of its most outstanding elements, it would be said that the crisis of representation opens space to a renewed conception of what can be drawing, of what can be painting, today.

João Queiroz constructs a path that seems to occupy this threshold where formal freedom is the only rule, the discrete rule of a gesture that is registered between subject and object to precisely redefine the field of tensions and apories that stand out between the two terms. I said a gesture, but I could also say movement. ahnungslos is a set of watercolor graphite works that take up and clarify an old concern in João Queiroz, that of specifying in which terms movement reveal that drawing and painting, portrays adventure and experience, or discovery and analogy, to use a vocabulary network that is particularly dear to the artist. And will be ahnungslos painting or drawing? And what region is this where gender definitions become an uninteresting academic exercise, devoid of cognitive, perceptual or affective value? It isn't meaningless to appeal here to the philosophical density that is part of the movement.

The body, always the body, or the scenery, after all, are tropes of a systematic disassembly of subject/object apories, a disassembly that phenomenology has been able to explore with great effectiveness, and João Queiroz, implicitly and explicitly, calls for in his work and in his reflection on his work. While it is true that the painter chooses Espinosa as his philosopher, he does not fail to recognize the importance of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as major figures in his career. The body and perception, in their relationship of deep link with space, is suggestively one of the topics of João Queiroz's work, but so is written language in its materiality and symbolic expressiveness, in an approach that reminds us of chinese painting, in particular Xu Wei (徐渭) that extraordinary 16th century artist who will have profoundly marked the East and, perhaps, the West, if we think, via Barthes, of a figure like Cy Twombly. In fact, language has a decisive dimension here, if only because, for João Queiroz, metaphor is a fundamental axis of relationship with the world, the body being a device for the metaphorical constitution of the world. The artist's work is a reflection of our corporeal condition in the world. The movement here is an axial element, as I said. The body is thought because it moves, João Queiroz seems to want to tell us. All the stillness of meaning is thus rooted in a walk, in a solitary and mobile meditation in regions that may be bordering on the geometries and metrics established by the most canonical modernity. It's not surprising that the artist points to uncovered and the agrammaticality as important aspects of the metaphor and its paths. ahnungslos forward us to O Ecrã no Peito, a work from 1999, in which this deep link between the body and the landscape in its analogical and metaphorical generativity is clear. It is the density of these relationships that is at issue here, and as Nelson Goodman taught us, it is density, when combined with other symptoms, that suggests aesthetics.

Not without a consideration of the nuances that such an observation requires, it would be said that João Queiroz's work is an attempt to densify our relationship with the landscape or, rather, with a seeing that moves and that is already a thought. Otherwise, it would also be said that João Queiroz seems to affirm a kind of distance from modern perceptual traps based on an objective, reifying, and fundamentally disenchanted, because it is literal, conception of the world. Returning to oriental painting, what João Queiroz requires of us is that we be aware of the impossibility of mapping partitions between writing and painting in this relationship with the world. Isn't drawing or painting also writing? , could you ask us the artist. It seems indisputable that the master calligraphers, when they wrote, also drew or painted (the terms are interchangeable here) what they observed, that is to say, what moved, even if imperceptibly, in nature. However, as in João Queiroz, I would dare suggest, it was not a question of doing justice to contours or shapes, but rather of reproducing, in his gestures, the rhythms and oscillations of the world.

Luís Quintais
September 2014