On the 7th March 2009, as curator of the Niteroí Contemporary Art Museum (MAC), Rio de Janeiro, I inaugurated an exhibition Pictorial Investigations. As the name indicates, it was an exhibition of paintings, of the most traditional method, as told in the history of art since the 15th century – period in which the name first occurred. The idea of bringing the theme to light came from the desire to examine a production, at the same time both original and alive, painted with the passion of young artists, in spite of the flood of new methods, which can be seen in the production of art in the last fifteen years.
To speak of painting in present times can have two facets, one boring and the other innovative, as the subject is at times antiquated and at others an atemporal jewel waiting to be rediscovered. As luck would have it, the facts are neither one nor the other.
It is well-known that painting has had death and bankruptcy declared throughout the 20th century, and, to understand where this idea of “death” came from it is necessary to go back 150 years in time. Even if I risk being tripped up, I will try to do this analysis of the past in as few paragraphs as possible.
The first blow in the sovereignty of painting as a principal means of representation of nature up to the 19th century was the birth of photography. However, while the function of mere representation of painting grew weaker, support for the canvass began, a few decades later, to give way to experimentation of modernist vanguards who sought new figurative possibilities, thus putting off such announced death.
Nevertheless, at the end of the 1960s, it was with the second wave of vanguard that painting would become a reference of conservatism, seeing that the canvass could no longer keep up with all that was required for research – and questioning. Art became politics and philosophy, presented in a field expanded beyond objective support, in a period marked by the production of technological works supported by video and photography.
In its own way, out of sight of North-American modern critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, who analysis of works of art was supported by formal biases, it was not interested in the conceptual creations and, to the contrary to what had been done with abstract painting in the 1950s, abstained from judging in favor of any artistic practice. In this way, it can be said that a pictorial production of the 1970s was overshadowed by all of another production and its death, finally, seemed irremediable.
Nevertheless, as Paul Wood and Francis Frascina observed (1998:230) “in the history of modern art, the actual absence of the cultivation of an area could become interesting to a new generation: times change, and with them, necessities.” In this way, at the beginning of the 1980s, with an artistic scene saturated with photographic documents, video experiments and ephemeral works, painting is understood as a breath of renewal or even, innovation. Explosions of flowers, figures, graphic elements and great shapes sieged galleries and museums, attending in such a way a generation of painters who had continued to think of painting in terms of the market, anxious to circulate lesser “bland” works in the fine arts. The decade was then characterized by its pop declared casual, and in its own way, futile, and rescued the labor of painting and a certain humanistic character which had been forgotten in the conceptual and minimalist production.
And so we reach the 1990s, when, again, the market was saturated with paintings and we are shaken by the revolution of new communication technologies. In the middle of all these new things, the phenomenon of the 1970s seems to be repeating itself making the traditional media of handcraft procedures, as is the case of painting, were postponed by the fascination of digital and electronic support. Yet, as has already been quoted, the actual fact of an absence of cultivation of an area can become interesting. It is this that we are seeing happening today. Painting has not died and neither is it being rediscovered; it simply never left the scene – and never will.
At this time when it seems that we have overcome the era of multiculturalism, painters begin at the beginning, not referring anymore their research on the basis of western Europeans, as was all the history of art up until the post-modern period. In this way, far from searching for a Brazilian method of painting or international, what we see – and the exhibition Pictorial Investigations points to this – is a thematic diversity, of references, procedures and techniques which awards all productions of present day art, including pictorial, to which this discourse is not precisely allied to a single reference or questioning.
Thus, it was surprising to look carefully at a production of paintings of young artists, Brazilians, and perceive that the field is wide and offers works of quality and refinement. The curator’s selection of Pictorial Investigations was solely an outline, but I hope that it will serve to indicate that painting continues and will continue to exist, no matter how digital or cyber we become in the future.
Bibliography:
WOOD, Paul; FRASCINA, Francis. Modernismo em Disputa – A arte desde os anos quarenta. São Paulo. Cosac & Naify, 1998.
