Maria de Fátima Lambert

Painting Exhibition of Francisco Laranjo Riga (Latvia) – September 2002

For X.Z.M.

1

Ekphrasis and Landscape: “Now I am a sensitive being”2

“The act of remembering may transform what is incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and what is consummated (suffering) into something incomplete.” Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Schriften.

I

“Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within.” Paul Auster, “City of Glass”, The New York Trilogy, London, Faber & Faber, 1987

1. Throughout time and by many artists, landscape has (sometimes) been

constructed as equivalent to nature. It was understood and made visible as an analogon. Which implied a practice of painting that surreptitiously and persistently conformed our cognitive categories and, therefore, conditioned our spatial perceptions.

2. Improved definitions of the world were promoted through landscape; poetic extrapolations of the real were aimed at. Thus one would arrive at a celebration of the world, through artifice, achieved through the artists’ distinguished intentions. In the XV century, for example, landscape was only considered natural due to its almost supreme level of artifice.

3. Historical obsession in the representation of landscape also consisted of organizing objects within a given space that interconnected them, thus possessing specific characteristics.

4. Historically, conceptualisation of landscape depends on different approaches, matrixes, knowledge and technologies.

5. In the last decades of the XX century, the purpose of new figurative and representational revisitings was taken up again by some authors through the pictorial (and spatial) approach to landscape.

6. This mingling of territories, also considered in their aesthetic condition – real, surreal, abstract... - and not exclusively socio-artistic,

1 “...Pero hacia donde vaya llevaré tu mirada...”– Pablo Neruda, Crepusculario, “Farewell”. 2 Hôgen Daidô, On the Open Way

anthropological or ideological, provided the absence of frontiers; almost the annulling of domains. In the contemporary situation, the sphere of landscape took on the proportions of the panorama.

7. The landscape of nowhere (sometimes knowingly atopical) was disembodied; revealing the anthropological iconoclasm then lived. Incursion into aesthetic landscape reflected an effective intention, aiming at approximation through irony, of philosophical recycling, of historical critique of painting (in relation to itself), but it also meant a prospective return, with individuated propriety, of painting itself.

II

“Those tormented by the fever find great relief in the sight of painting of fountains, rivers and small brooks, a fact that can be proven.” Léon-Battista Alberti

1. We know, through the conventionality of European Art, of the opposition that characterizes Western landscape and Far Eastern landscape. They present striking differences as to their chronology and technique. Their respective affirmative natures make a simple comparative study impossible. However, when carefully considering both iconographies, one may observe numerous instances of reciprocal influence. This was the case held during the Middle Ages in Siena: the residue of such influence had touched, as an example, Piero della Francesca (see the landscape of the hills in the back of the portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Montefeltro). On the other hand, Italian influence can be noted in Islamic miniatures. That reciprocal influence was also almost certainly felt in the védute with rocks by the Dutch painter Joachim Patiner (circa 1480-1524). The most determining and well-divulged case – of the influence of Eastern conception on the West – was introduced through the print work in the paintings of the impressionists and post-impressionists, and later in the fauvists. In the opposite direction, the East, from the XVII century on, received particular contaminations from classical buildings or archaeological reconstructions.

Dialogue between Western and Eastern conceptions of landscape is approximated in the work of Francisco Laranjo. His canvases and drawings are islands in an ocean that, going against cartography and without any dissolution of identity, bring both ideas of landscape together. The direction of his gaze, a principle prior to the making of the painting, is like that solitude when facing the landscape that travellers see (those who travel and stay in one place, not tourists…) that can be found in journals lived out somewhere:

“Je suis seul, assis en face de l’immense grise de la mer murmurante...je suis seul…seul comme je l’ai toujours été partout, comme je le serai toujours à travers le grand Univers charmeur et décevant… » Isabelle Eberhardt, Lettres et Jornaliers, Paris, Actes du Sud, 1987.

2. According to some researchers, Chinese landscapes and, later, Japanese landscapes, most probably have their origins in cartography and in recourse to the imagetics of landscapes for the decoration of palaces, as well as in screens and painted rolls. Francisco Laranjo constructs a new conceptual, saluting both traditions.

“I slowly unroll the paintings, and as I observe them, I move forward in a boundless extension that surrounds me on all sides and opens me into a feeling of the infinite inspired by the sky.” Zong Bing

The basic tenets of Taoism underlie this poetic declaration by the painter Zong Bing (375-443), thus very probably pre-empting the evolution of landscape painting in a multi-dimensional manner (for him, reading the rolled-up painting was the same as a journey through spaces that could be travelled objectively), which was thought to be above all due to the work of Wang Wei (699-759). Anthropo-cosmological awareness of the variety of nature produced – with remarkable results, even in Japan – series of screens and roll-paintings depicting the four seasons and weather changes -- works whose typology and character have been commented on and explained by different specialists. The atmospheric effect, which is so emblematic of this painting, was achieved by replacing discontinuous lines and/or patches that originally limited the forms and, also, by the representation of layers of low clouds between two mountain peaks, an invention attributed to Mi Fu (1051-1107). These procedures were added to by the treatment of stains (called “splashed paint”) in all the images, known since the time of Muqi (a painter active between 1240 and 1270). One of the painting qualities centres on the simplification and use of empty spaces, and led to a high degree of abstraction with Xia Gui (active between 1190 and 1225). Following this, the disappearing of the lyrical intensity would be compensated, time and again, by a vigorous expressionism (for example, in Gao Qipei, 1672-1734, who painted directly with his fingers).

“Supposing someone who imagines understanding And builds illusions about his own Revelation, Glimpsing the Spirit that animates everything Unites the way and purifies the soul, And gives birth to the desire for rising to heaven itself; These are no more than premises of the limited Exploration of the frontiers, But their action is insufficient to achieve The Way of absolute emancipation.” Dogen, Fukanzazaengi

3. All of these presuppositions, all of these meanderings through the history and aesthetics of landscape painting, serve to apprehend the conciliation that is stated in the work of Francisco Laranjo. Without symbolic or social deformations, his painting and drawing involve planes that can be articulate and are enriching, taken from either one or another of the two areas of wisdom.

If from renaissance theorisation of drawing3, there is a stressing of its essential substance, its indispensable presence of bearing, a “wide and welcoming Way” is expanded from the Japanese way, in which the game of spaces and graphic fillings are implied. The metaphysical definition of emptiness that Francisco Laranjo establishes, whether through the long extension of the background or through the density of dominant colours – in the smaller canvases – aggravates the intensity and simultaneous subtlety of details approximating the waves of visual and sound perception, which is almost olfactory and tactile and emanates towards us. Its synaesthetic multivalency confronts the two worlds, expanding through the countless paths to be unveiled. The “rolls” of painting drawn in diluted and intense blacks, the units of transposition to the multiple neutrality of variants of grey and white demand the dramatic almost uniformising pigmentation of the small canvases. The latter are understood as minimum vestiges “of yes and of no”, in which “the two depend on the one...”4 The articulation of the calligraphy with the consigning of graphic elements that configure the landscape stimulates an ethics of the image as a landscape-substance. The emptied dimension, from which drawings of essence and nature are suspended, is the supreme vehicle for the liberation of restlessness (East) and of disquietude (West).

Landscape may be conceived of as a rhetorical description of a work of art – saving theoretical discussions for such an argument... The calligraphic landscape opens the way to being made present in the mind, through the signs, the words, the graphic symbols, a person’s effectiveness, of a place, indeed, the almost material concretion of an image... susceptible of being volumetricised. It is the aestheticising of landscape through visual language; it is the verbal depicting of visual experience...

Francisco Laranjo’s present exhibition stresses the concepts/principles underlying the aesthetic perception of landscape achieved for the receiver subject – the property of the individual who generates it:

- Aspect/approximation/detail - Overview/drawing away/amplification - Rigour/”direct” appropriation of appearance/essence - Expansiveness/retaining of perceptive suppositions - Transformation/deformation/transfiguration – of the seen and of the

invisible.

3 I recall, by Francisco de Holanda, Da pintura Antiga, the enriching arguments, in keeping with

the aesthetic thought of Michelangelo, present throughout different chapters in the book. Francisco de Holanda was a Portuguese writer of the XVI century, a contemporary of Michelangelo Buonarroti (of whom he was a direct source of his thought). He travelled to Italy, where he remained for many years. He worked on the subject of art, and was the author of an extensive body of work, of which, besides the work quoted, the famous Diálogos de Roma (1538) is of note. 4 I am freely quoting excerpts from “Inscription on Faith in the Spirit” by Sin Sin Ming, in Jacques

Brosse, Os Mestres Zen, Lisbon, Pergaminho, 1999, pp.38-39

Thus, the true action of the soul on things returns; the discovery of meaning following the traces, the graphic marks of the instant and of duration: “If we abandon ourselves to all words, to all thoughts/ There will be no place for us to go.”5

III Not following (or remaining) in the body of the outstretched, unrolled or concentrated landscape, all routes of vision are plausible, as long as they are brought from within oneself, the object erasing the subject, the distinctions being extinguished, the saturation capsizing. “I am here , and there is nothing to say . If among you are those who wish to get somewhere , let them leave at any moment . What we re-quire is silence ; but what silence requires is that I go on talking . Give any one thought a push : it falls down easily ; but the pusher and the pushed pro-duce that enter- tainment called a dis-cussion . Shall we have one later ? Or , we could simply de-cide not to have a dis- cussion . What ever you like . But now there are silences and the words made help make the silences . I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it .”

John Cage, “Conference about nothing”, Silence, New England, Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

The construction of landscapes results from the discussion of the active and passive visual elements that interact within the author, simultaneously invading him and being born from him. The silences and the words become indifferent, the meanings without urgency, the aesthetic permissiveness impregnates humanist conscience. Words can be used to draw internal landscapes, full of incoherencies and of participating logics. The diluted or explicit evocations that are revealed or retained belong to the memory or to the future of each one of us, as we intend to be the authors of inaudible landscapes. It is up to the observer to make himself available to follow the decompression of the gaze loaded with constricting social or psycho-affective preconceptions.

To know he is travelling, building the sequence interspersed by fragments of landscape that are cut, separate and gather together again. The landscape unfolds, the detail is nucleated, and time is centred in the bare space.

5 Idem, Ibidem

(“Everything has changed because we have changed it; it has changed both the outer and the inner geography.” Thomas Bernhard, Darkness)

Maria de Fátima Lambert July 2002