Dese(mpe)nho

Drawing is the methodology and the result of Diogo Pimentão's work, but not necessarily the center of his process.

Each drawing is the result of a development that we can call performative, even when its graphic brand does not derive from a performance that the artist actually performs in the exhibition space - although this can also happen.

Let's say that each drawing, or each series of drawings (as well as each sculpture, or each installation) corresponds to a certain performance of an action, or of a set of actions that, over and over again, rehears a possibility of refining a procedure whose meaning is only manifested in the immanence of the brand but which always seems to come before it.

This notion of progressive fine-tuning through repetition is always present, like making an effort to execute a work of precision, whose raison d'être lies in its fictional difficulty. Thus, for each procedure, Diogo Pimentão defines a set of parameters, a set of possible gestures which, when repeated, develop a very specific proficiency - so specific that it doesn't constitute any kind of technique, but gains an exemplarity, sometimes surrounded by an ironic mystery about its nature.

The form is, therefore, a necessary result of a high non-canonical performativity, which is exercised on the brink of failure, of the fictional difficulty of a virtuosity without pride, almost working-class.

We can therefore conclude that performance is the methodology and the result of Diogo Pimentão's work and that, sometimes, drawing is the center of his process.

Delfim Sardo
January 2011

Ciclo Negro

In this first episode of the Ciclo das Cores, CAPC set out to strip the Black bare, to show him in his raw, behavioral state: the Black in life, as a multidimensional fact made up of adversities and dissent.

Often associated in the teleological tropism of Modernism, with the cul de sac of self-referential painting, the autotelic labyrinth of which the Black Quadrangle (1915), the landscape of unobjectivity, by Kasimir Malevitch was a kind of liminal emblem (how many people know that this image was born from his Allogism (a cubo-futurist pictorial avatar of Zaoum, of the transrationality of the Russian modernist poet Velimir Khlebnikov) but above all from the countless scenic studies for the opera Victory over the Sun (1913) by Mikhail Matiouchine?), Black has an ancient and heterodox content. In Kantian rationality, it had a very different meaning to the one it achieved in the Mesopotamia of the Assyrians. Today, at the beginning of this cyber-gothic century, where the chimneys of Fordism are no longer the obelisks of the new era, where secondary identities, second lives and the impoverishment of experience have become routine, what is the meaning of Black?

Black is a victim of the war of the worlds where the clash between order and chaos, birth and death, verb and deluge, energy and rest, have acquired a political dimension, polarizing in the agonism between good (“Us”) and evil (“Them”), between Athenians and Metecos, between ethnic belonging and the uprooting of the migrant subject. Black is condemned to silent prayer, beaten by the commonplace (“barbaric, imperfect, shapeless, incomprehensible, irrelevant” — the rationality of the administrators shouts at him).

What meaning and scope did this solid doomed to absorb all other solids have for Galen? And for Simmel, the characterizer of the atomism and disorientation of metropolitan subjectivity? Would his black be nervous, calculating, synthetic? How is it a calculating color?
 

What did the word Black mean to Picasso in 1908, at the Trocadéro, with Derain by his side? Perhaps the true God... of the reunion between identity and representation, the God of correspondence that Baudelaire spoke of.

Why is it that the incarnation of bad luck, life without a second chance, promiscuity (and also dance, the sensuality that holds our lives together) is tutored in Slavic children's tales by a dark, Caucasian woman with deep black hair? And you, the Big Bad Wolf, because you're black and greasy? And you Snow White because you were never a Tchokwe princess?

Black appears as a brutalist construction, a tunnel (cave?) between two points of light (two seasons), Black is otherness. We need a map of black where the impalpable and the untouchable are borderlands. CAPC is looking for the first coordinates of this work in this color without an object.

And in the death of an orange, when does black, the irreversible, announce itself?

Pedro Pousada
January 2012