«Imperious Caesar, Dead and Turn'd to Clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
Or, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!»

Shakespeare (Hamlet, Act V, Scene I)
 

Pedro Pascoinho's work seems to inspire our more voyeuristic side, and it's inevitable to feel as if we find ourselves peeking into someone's stories. Can we see, perhaps, someone's dream, of the artist? , of one of these characters, perhaps the one whose head rests softly on a hard and uncomfortable top. He's dead and he won't care. Or maybe you sleep dreaming of a daily life of faces and bodies, of movements through a very dark night that seems to highlight those spaces, houses, ruins united by a timeline, a line that crosses the paintings, even if it is not always visible, a line that crosses all of Pascoinho's work from a very early age. But it's also as if the artist had somehow found a way to show us the memory process via image, matter, and sound.

Passage is the name chosen for this exhibition to open at the headquarters of the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra. A name that suggests, as the artist confirms, the passage of time shown through the faces and bodies that disturb the observer, dispelling any sign of rest, of immobility, that a portrait could presume. Even the figure mentioned above, who appears to be asleep (perhaps forever), effectively invokes a body in levitation, perhaps the product of a profound meditation carried out by Pascoinho, regarding the evolution of his own work that insists on the accurate continuity of his images. The chronological time marked by the various motifs present in this work — the trees, the lines, the old, the new — is associated with ruin and abandonment. An end and a beginning, death and regeneration.

Passage It is, according to the artist, also inspired by a passage or an excerpt from Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, which refers to Caesar's ashes and to the way in which they materialize and immortalize themselves. If it is true that the Emperor of Rome shook the world while alive, now dead, he can help to heal existing gaps and holes, protecting, for example, a house from winter tremors:

«Dead, imperial Caesar is just clay now;
It serves to block the wind outside.
What was once a nightmare in the world
It caulks walls, saves us from ice.» [1]

It is in this context that we can understand the piece-installation Continuity, in which clay and ash give rise to black-colored particles ready to cover the open tear in the wall, a break in time that immortal matter can sew and help heal, at the same time that, flowing almost liquid, it transforms into something else. Here, it expands into a stain that attaches the eye to the ground, a black puddle that you want to touch, stick your arm or head into this other hole produced, perhaps Alice's rabbit hole through which we can reach another dimension, another time.

And from another time, the characters exhibited in Pascoinho's work tell us, who take as models figures taken from old magazines, collected a long time ago, underlining his interest in the past, in images with classic contours that, inscribed on the wallpaper and drawn, immediately lose any more nostalgic intention they could suggest. This is because these are timeless figures, from before and now, they are familiar to us because they are united by the collective memory of the observer. A collective memory that encompasses events, images, and figures from our history, such as the panel or mural taken from the artist's studio, seems to demonstrate. This montage of images, photographs, drawings, pieces of dark cloth mixed with pages of paper and written notes, is a revealing visual note of the history of this world, of this time and of others that are part of Pascoinho's creative process and that helped to compose Passage.

The chosen title therefore refers to multiple meanings based on the same idea of transition, of movement, which can be temporal (from childhood to adulthood, to old age), musical or literary (an excerpt from a certain work), or even a section of a painting, for example, as we find and recognize in the artist's notes and displayed on his panel/mural.

In this way, the artist's characters and places are a matter of the dark because they are the product of his and our memory, which is naturally fragmented, excused, elusive and selective. This is how we understand the options taken by Pascoinho, when placing these bodies and faces in almost dreamlike actions and positions, giving us a glimpse or a fragment of a face and a body, actions that involve meditation, reflection or falling asleep, figures that peek and are peeked, apparently trapped in an environment full of secrets and whispers that the 12-minute soundpiece composed by the artist and inspired by Olivier Messiaen, highlights and conquers, pointing to an endless place from which it is not possible to escape, where maybe you don't want to escape, despite the eminent light perceived through the cracks (“Fissure”) and the lines that, clear and luminous, contrast with the darkness emitted by human forms. And because there is this appeal to dreams and memory, the buildings and landscapes present in Pascoinho's exhibition work are subject to the same lack of clarity, a harbinger of the ruin and the fragment, but also of destruction. Passage like a corridor through the violence of world history, evident in the selected images of the panel/mural or in the intense color of the roof of “Extension” that threatens to overflow its limits, one of the few counterpoints to the black and white of memory, and not exempt from the same tense load that it pierces Passage.

Because in memory there is always something that remains hidden or hidden, something that seems to escape our mind and that can appear suddenly, such as through a flash,[2] to disappear immediately afterwards, something that seems close but is not reachable - something that, perhaps, will be out of the frame.

Ana Pires Quintais

[1] Hamlet, W. Shakespeare, p. 199. Lisbon: Editorial Presença. Translation by José Blanc from Portugal. Not original: «Imperious Caeser, dead and turn'd to clay, /Might stop a hole to keep the wind away, /O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe/ Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flow!» (Act. V. Scene. I).

[2] The luminous spots that we often find in Pascoinho's works seem to indicate precisely this idea.

«In nature nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed»
Lavoisier‍

«Repeat, repeat, until it's different»
Manoel de Barros

If I were to interview Pedro Pascoinho with just one question about his work as a painter — I'm not a journalist to ask questions, nor marketeer competent to carry out campaigns or careers, but I have known him as such for about 20 years, and that I followed his life and work closely — perhaps I would ask him, with the expected introductory roundues and long sentences (which he would accept to be inevitable in an attempt to summarize 20 years of work and in an oral speech such as the interview), something like this:

Your work was always figurative, it began with many figures and stories, it was refined as if you were using a zoom, in the sense that you were always reducing the field of the image, let's say, from the general to the particular, but despite these apparent differences and the immediate classifications that, due to some analogy and eagerness to catalog something that seems strange to us and that we feel insecure in learning without having a name, people have been cataloguing it as surrealist, pop, classic, new state, Hopper, Neo Rauch, Borremans and so on... despite this, Zia, repair That you always give titles to works or series such as: Models, Hold Icons, Collectors, Art Revisions, Under Current, The Permanence, No Future, Sustain, Remain, Emerge, Inside, Unavoidable, Establishment, Alignment, Parallel, Transition, etc., and now this exhibition at the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra is entitled Passage (and I list so many, in retrospect, to remind us that there were always only small increments, close ideas, and the same conceptual universe, even in the works that were the subject of such diverse cataloguings, since an exhibition showing all these works has not yet appeared) and that you have always resorted to the same process of collecting images and waiting for some fragment to impose itself as inevitable for your work, and that you always spoke of memory, time, passage, matter, emergence, chronological line, perfectly visible to you from the beginning and, if something was changing, it was your perception of the level of refinement of the concepts and the clarity and simplicity of what you intended to do, that I had the privilege of listening to you explain several times, without ever having found out for you in these 20 years without having a clear idea behind each work you were producing, which cemented a friendship also founded on admiration for your knowledge and coherence, characteristics that generate doubts but also the impulse to respond to them in an authentic way.

After this introduction, the question will only be: Pedro Pascoinho, how do you feel as a painter of these things, what did you decide to be and create?

And I imagine a possible answer from him but without the shameless limitations always imposed by direct speech...:

«Actually, 20 years can be confusing. making with being. However, my existence is separated from the existence of the things I did to the exact extent that the things I do are separated from the other things that others do, for the simple fact that I am perfectly aware that I, the others, the whole world, including all painting and thought, are made of the same matter forever and ever, but what makes me unique among all matter is that I exist through the awareness that the matter that constitutes me is connected and animated in a different way, for example, from the matter of the floor that I walk on or of the brush that I grab, or the water I drink, just as I am aware that my painting exists through this conscious distinction of the matter with which it animates, even though it shows a body similar to a body, a memory similar to a memory.

If I were unaware of my existence and of the existence of my work, both distinct from all other matter in the universe, I might be concerned with just listening to the “pimba music” — which is the hasty, first-impression criticism of someone who doesn't know my work and not even, perhaps, is well aware of the cataloguings that you use, and that you mentioned, such as Surrealism, Pop, Hopper or Borremans, etc. — and then, I wouldn't have enough energy to do Pedro Pascoinho's painting alone, that is, the one that no one else you can do it.

It never occurred to me to stop doing what I seek, the detail, the most precise formulation, that you refer to when you say that I did and do zooms, on a path that I consider mine and that was never guided by what I saw others do, whether through imitation or refusal. I am not saying in any way that I am not influenceable, that, with immense honor, I do not feel like the son of a line of painters (such as Jan van Eyck, Vermeer or Rembrandt), where I drank a lot, consciously and unconsciously, with brothers at various times, where we must have incubated the genesis of our painting, each one following its physiological process of evolution, which is repeated from individual to individual who inherits the same genetics, as an application of a natural law, which continues to produce different individuals and personalities, A same morphology. Sometimes, along the line of history, we find scientists who, in different parts of the world, are simultaneously finding and investigating the same problem and formulating similar answers, even without knowing each other, as if they were in telepathic communication — in short, this must have a little to do with them looking at the world with the same references — and developing separately a thought formed with the same genetics or obtaining the same solution through different ways.

I think I already have enough maturity to know what I have done and that I am no longer confused, at least for a careful look, just with what I inherited or chose to inherit. This exhibition, Passage, which I imagine as an almost microscopic look at the apparition, the brilliant and primal revelation of the fluid transit of matter, has in the CAPC a piece with three paintings and a mirror, with an installation character, which I entitled This Land Is Yours and it refers exactly to what we received, even if that inheritance has the shadow of a strong Father, such as God or a great man. The autonomy that makes us exist in our own right involves accepting the legacy and knowing what to do with it, that is, in a distinctive way, adding to it our brand, our path, making the heritage truly ours. And whenever we look to see what we have become our heritage, if we have done so consciously, there will be the face of our ancestor reflected, and our respectful recognition of our lineage, which we did not have to abandon (let alone deny), just to hide the specter of our non-existence.

Therefore, to summarize the answer, I always feel exclusively attentive to the subject matter of my work process and to the incessant thought that I order in this way (or vice versa) and to always try to do what is imposed on me as what I have to do.»

Anyway, that's what he might answer me, if it were me... or what I thought I would say... if it were him.

Eduardo Rosa