I like art. Up to a certain point. Recently, I realized that it took me many years as an apprentice, reading, discussing, arguing, enjoying, thinking, practicing with peoples work to be able to get to the point that, for me, really matters: — when your eyes and your analyzing skills are trained in making the circuit required to GET INTO a work of art. It all depends of a large amount of factors: what you know about art plus what you think about religion and what you know about poetry/architecture/music, your thoughts about sexuality, day by day life, what books you have read, free thinking, where you were born and raised, what you know about history of art, tastes you acquired during your lifetime, artworks that you have seen/liked/disliked, the archival of images you have in your head, the movies you have seen, what you did this morning and so on. NOW you are ready to fully enjoy art. To find works where you do not expect to have art, where there is NO intention of something be art. You are in business now. Able to create” INSTANT ALL FOR YOURSELF” art. Don’t take me wrong, of course I still like to see artist’s works, but the older I get, I like less and less works..But when I see a work that I like, it makes my day. A few years ago I was in this town called Belo Horizonte in Brazil, and I went with some friends to this Museum da Pampulha, projected by Oscar Niemeyer, located in a beautiful park outside of the city, to see a photo exhibition of a well know artist. I didn’t like the show– to me it seemed to be the beginning of the end of photography. I thought so, because the artist showed some images of some objects on the top of tables, and under the tables, the objects themselves.. SMART. But the same thing happened to painting years ago….. Photography doesn’t suffice as a language anymore, it needed a hand from outside (in this case, underneath). In the case of painting, it had to be a painting PLUS something else, like: continuing the image on the wall, hanging objects on the surface, even using acupuncture needles, putting a bench in front of it and calling it “an installation” … Anyway, after the show, we got in the car and someone mentioned that we HAD to go see the ballroom, also by Niemeyer, in the same park but in the other side of the lake. When we got there, deception…. there was a sign on the door saying that they had just put some product on the floor and we could not go inside. So my friends went to sit under a tree nearby while I decided to throw some conversation out with the caretaker, who was by the lake on his uniform, FISHING—–Hi, I said, too bad we can’t go visit the building….Yes, he said, no one can go inside for the next 24 hours…..And, as he was fishing, I asked: have you caught any fish yet??? And he, pulling up the bamboo rod with the nylon line attached to it said: NO, THERE IS NO HOOK IN HERE, I AM JUST KILLING TIME…..Damn, forget contemporary art, this guy was fishing with no hook on. Definitely it made my day. He was probably thinking about his childhood or the soccer game he watched last night and his team lost or just imagining the fishes circulating around that line wondering what the heck…

Another time I was walking from my apartment to my studio, which are 2 blocks away, when I saw this completely eaten by rust falling apart old car, full of holes everywhere, and the guy who owned it proudly working on the only square foot of good paint in the hood, given it a careful polish. TURBO POETRY.

Or, on the same block, some other time, this old guy sweeping the sidewalk, then suddenly stopped his action, grabbed the middle sized tree with both hands and starts shaking it with all his strength. ADVANCING TIME.

These stories are not funny. To me, they are beautiful. They are INSTANT ART, not meant to be, but still…..

In my opinion, when an artist is going to talk about his/hers work, one should not say like IN THIS WORK THE IDEA WAS BLA BLA AND THIS MEANS/REPRESENTS BLA BLA and stuff. An artist must not know everything about his work. He/she must know, in my view, the spine, the dorsal column of his/hers thoughts conceptually and aesthetically in the long run. Most of the times it can be very disappointing or boring to see an artist talking about his/hers work. Many years ago, during the Sao Paulo Biennale, there was this work by an artist from Israel, and I will see if I can more or less describe it with accuracy: there was a pass way where you would stand, and on both sides there was a room with a very thick and strong glass, and inside of each room there was one of those machines that throws plates to practice shooting with guns. So you are standing in this pass way knowing that the machine will throw a plate in your direction and, even though you are sure that the glass will hold it, when the plates come flying towards you, you get scared. BEAUTIFUL, this guy is talking about ANTICIPATION……. It is like going out to a doctor to take a shot in the butt…..You anticipate it and suffer in advance. Not like kicking the sidewalk wearing flip flops. It hurts much more, but you don’t expect it. Not to mention how we anticipate death.. And then BAMMM, another plate flying and people screaming. Two days later the artist was going to give a lecture and I decided to go… He seemed smart, held everybody’s attention for 15 minutes and then……. IN THIS WORK, THE IDEA WAS TO REPRESENT THE SNIPERS IN JERUSALEN, HOW ONE IS ALL THE TIME IN DANGER. Men, how I preferred my anticipation thing. Not that snipers, Jerusalem and danger aren’t good material for art. But it seems that the artist has the final word and that is it. Not for me, though.

Sorry if I am writing this comments. I, myself, hate when I go somewhere and the person sits there and READ. It is because English is not my first language and I rather have the time to sit in front of a computer and write and re-write and maybe this way I can be better understood.. For this reason I am asking someone to read it for me. It will sound more clear. When I have to speak about my work, I always talk about a million other things before I get to the point of mentioning my work itself. So, here I go. Here is the lecture I gave in Banff during my residence there back in 1999:

“My work is an attempt to generate memory through painting.

I’m interested in new significances.

My work deals with friction, tension, forms, surface, relations, constructions.

To be a painter today is like being the lawyer of a serial killer

I’m going to show 40 slides of works produced in the last 10 years, in chronological order, . I’m going to show them really fast, so I’ll consider this as my very first piece of video art.”

I don’t see why so many people give so much emphasis on philosophy when talking about art. It seems that it gives a certain serious aspect on things. Philosophy is, in my opinion, ONE of those aspects that I mentioned in the beginning.The avantgard days are over, post modernism is today an old idea….Art is more a thing based on accumulated experiences. Also, I don’t like to quote and quotations in general. People tend to quote only HIGH THOUGHTS, again to add a serious, respectful aspect on things, Not that I go for humorous or cynical things either, that is not my stuff. But I really am into INVENTION,TRANSFORMATION, ERRORS, HABILITY, LACK OF HABILITY, INTENCION, LACK OF INTENTION, PECULIAR STATES OF MIND, SPECIFIC ATMOSPHERES,VERTICALIZATIONS, THE UNEXPECTED,THE SIMPLE and a huge list of things.

I have been giving painting workshops one afternoon a week for the past 15 years. I always ask a new student on the first day to give me the names of 3 living painters that interests him/her. I also like to ask why are they interested in painting, since if everything goes right, it will take 15 years to get to something .IF everything goes right. And after all these 15 years he/she will find out that he/she wont get invitations for anything, while their friends who started at the same time doing other stuff time are refusing shows for being booked out. I also like to say that the problems with painting nowadays are 3: HOW to paint, WHAT to paint and WHY to paint. Why should one try to work with a media that is so “poor” ( two dimensional, height and width, and to simulate 3 dimensions you must make use of tricks as perspective, lights and shades……). I tell them, “why don’t you try, lets say, INSTALATION, where you can use photos, music, sculpture, props, actors, video ,lighting, literature, design , bla bla AND painting ????” And by the end of the first class I always finish trying to explain that an artist NEVER puts something in code to be decodifed….forget that HUH, I GET IT sensation. It doesn’t exist. All the comprehension will pretty much depend on those factors that I already mentioned. IF you are looking for comprehension. But it is so beautiful NOT to look for comprehension… For me, the most difficult thing to explain, or to try to explain, is HOW AN ARTIST THINKS…. Not to mention that the VERY SAME work can be or not be ART depending on who did it. Men, I admire the students who come back for the second class….

Back in 2003, I asked Wayne Baerwaldt to write an essay for the book that was going to be published in occasion of the 25 Sao Paulo Biennale. He asked me for a statement and here is exactly what I gave him through email:

“Wayne, so here we go. First of all, did you receive all the 9 images I sent? Because the Postmaster keeps on saying that one of the 2 e-mails containing the images was undelivered.

The works that are going to be showed at the Biennale are 7, all around 190×250 cms, all horizontal, all oil on canvas, much more materia than before, very strange palette, more complex structure, and, in fact, what happened is that 10 years ago few elements were suspended in the space, then slowly they started to group up and to touch each other, populate more and more the compositions, and now they not just hold each other but they overlay and the result is more constructed and more painterly. Still the main point, in my view, is to generate memory, to create a real painting situation that will be recognized in the outer world afterwards. My most intense references, unfortunately, are not from Brazilian painters, even though I would feel good if I could say so. That’s one of the reasons why the local critics don’t know how to read my work, it looks as if I had fallen from parachute from the sky, they can not relate it to anything local, they don’t feel safe and , in my point of view, they cannot build a lineage that is so important to the culture of a nation. But lets go on with it: of course I have looked at (at different times); Kline, Twombly, Jonathan Lasker, Terry Winters, Julian Schnabel, Giorgio Morandi, Tapies, and some people say the paintings have something of Beatriz Milhazes (I disagree, my hand is heavier then hers, the sense of composition is distinct, maybe the only touching point is the GROUND/FIGURE matter).

The use of color is new. The palette had always been very limited, to avoid seduction throughout color itself. Now I abuse of an enormous possibility of very strange colors. One of my students died and I inherited all her oil colours, most of them I would never buy myself, and I am really enjoying it. The process is all very clear, the lousy use of stencils gives the chance to deconstruct the process of the paintings, of the exact moments that the decisions were taken. Wet paint mixes, fresh paint over dry paint leaves scars, juxtaposition, superposition. The result now is less graphic, less silent, more affirmative. All this as a result of trying to let the work fresh, to create new problems to be solved. Not a very professional statement, Wayne, but that is the direction the work is taking. Not anthropophagical, no simulacra, no new media, not self-related, no accionisms. Still trying to work on that bidimensional limited space, that real space, CONSTRUCTING A PAINTING UNIVERSE. Working hard to try to make an image that can hold itself together.”

I have been lucky and in this almost 20 years that I have been coming to Canada, I have met and made friends with some very good painters: Eleanor Bond, Wanda Koop, Will Murray, Ryan Slugget, Ron Moppet, Chris Cran, Shary Boyle, Numa, to mention just a few. None of them is the lawyer of a serial killer. Each one of them have solved the HOW, WHAT and WHY to paint problem in their own way. The beautiful thing about painting, and this, to me, explains WHY some people still insists on painting, is that, even though everyone starts to paint because of the pleasure of mixing colors, the challenge of the white canvas or even to find out if AM I ABLE TO REPRODUCE REAL LIFE?? CAN I DO AN ABSTRACT PAINTING???CAN I GIVE A MESSAGE???, having no idea of any concept nor aesthetic thing yet defined, the beauty of it, TO ME, is on the fact of belonging to a tradition, to be part of some thing that in a way is one pillar of the history of art and that, if not for any other reasons, is sufficient. I know it sounds terrible. But I like paintings….Sorry, I am a painter….The images are mine, the AFTER IMAGE is something that doesn’t below to me anymore. People will take control of the after image, depending on what did they do this morning, what do they like about poetry/music/cinema/day by day life, actual emotional state, the books they have read , where did they grow up and etcetera, and, in a way, they finish my paintings not only in their retinas, but in their heads, like editing a video on a computer, in the timeline mode, where they can add, subtract, reverse, slow motion, speed up , insert found footage, insert narration and so on , so, I ask them just one small favor——consider adding LOUD MUSIC FOR THESE SILENT PAINTINGS.

Last July I was part of the SLED ISLAND FESTIVAL in Calgary and had the chance to see a great show by Mogwai, one of my favorite bands. After every song, the guitar guy would say with his Scottish accent: THANK YOU VERY MA

So, for once, I will quote: for your attention, THANK YOU VERY MA.

NOVEMBER 2008