Pictorial Cognition: "The Fantastic World of Paula Rego" at Centro Comercial Colombo

Science is now enabling us to fully define the functions of pictorial cognition. And those defined functions enable us to understand that Rego's paintings have nothing to do with pictorial cognition. And actually, all the science is doing is confirming what many people have understood for quite some time. And which is that fact that "modern" art, and/or abstract non-representational art, is/was nothing more than a great big scam.

Is it right to reduce art to the science of visual perception and little more?

Or maybe I should say, can be so much more because clearly I'm on the pure rationalist side of art interpretation. That's fine, but can we risk missing all the other things that people see, all the other reasons they might have for reacting to a work, the cultural connections, the composition, the colour, the way a piece might relate to the space around it, the narrative etc.?

Do people only "understand" very figurative art that connects directly to their own personal experience? I would say that's extremely limited and fails to explain all the people who enjoy modern art, for example. Is there is role for, say, imagination in the execution or reading of art? That there is no role for fantasy. But ok. There's a lot of people binging their own personal prejudice to the viewing of art. 

I'm just an art dabbler, but some things seem to me pretty straightforward. The function of pictorial cognition, and the "art" of art, is actually the polar opposite of what some people may thing it is, and especially what some of the practitioners may want people to believe it is. Pictorial cognition does NOT reduce art to a science, or even a math, but actually does the opposite. The problem is in misunderstanding the function of the science and math, and how they are applied. Because I have no problem with the intrinsic nature of Rego's paintings, or others like her (abstractionists), but the problem is in attempting to define them as "genius," and the confusion that that misapplication effects. Because the function of pictorial cognition is analogous to pictorial syntax, or just the function of syntax in general. Which is the fact that there exists certain, basic, "structures" that define all functions, and then, as the universal sub-structures are applied, there can be an infinite amount of different variations "formed" through the applied function of the sub-structures.

(Shakespeare's Room by Paula Rego; picture taken by me at the exhibition)

If you're familiar with music, you know that all music contains certain sub-structures, such as notes expanded into chords, etc. So. Imagine that all musicians MUST learn, first, all of the universal sub-structures and then expand upon the sub-structures to become capable of producing the entire range of musical capabilities. Well, there is NOTHING wrong with laying down a few unstructured riffs, or chords, but: BUT, if you are using the word "genius" you are implying that you are headed in this direction:

“Mozart: People make a mistake who think that my art has come easily to me. Nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I have. There is not a famous master whose work I have not studied over and over.”

And, IF you are employing the label "genius," well then you are going to have to learn a hell of a lot of "rules," and then expand upon those universals, to produce the actual "art" of the endeavor, whatever it may be, as in: visual art - music - etc.

Emotion can be explained scientifically. We are making ever greater advances in this direction every day. The brain is nothing more than a bunch of electrical and chemical processes, and so can be studied as an objective phenomenon. A person reacting and responding to art is nothing more than their brain processing visual, and possibly auditory sense-data. Any emotional reaction will follow the visual processing of that data into a mental image. So, yes, science can indeed (at least in principle) fully explain people's responses to art.

I can't think of a living artist more deserving of a museum in her own lifetime. Her work is a beacon of beauty in an art world obsessed with endless novelty for the sake of novelty. Her work is simultaneously dark and beautiful and despite its frequently twisted undercurrent it has never seemed (to me) affected. Just an honest, ongoing search to produce increasingly stronger work. In terms of figurative artists that draw with a narrative obsession, Rego is certainly the match of the late Kitaj. Long may she continue. Rego is light years ahead of the usual hyped dross. An artist's artist - admired for her pictorial intelligence and genuine artistic skills, not for lucratively 'playing the game' like the usual smarmy wasters.

What I didn't like about the exhibition? It was presented in a X structure made of Styrofoam! Centro Colombo shame on you!


NB: Paula Rego is a Portuguese Painter/Visual Artist.

Pictoriality as a Fundamental Way of Perceiving Reality: "Amadeo de Sousa-Cardozo" at the Grand Palais, Paris

Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1887-1918)

"Odd Even 1 2 1", c. 1916

Private Collection

The bounds of space are not really dissolved.

They continue to exist and we also continue to recognize them. But where Sousa-Cardozo spreads to encompass different elements, the linguistic identity of the elements is questioned, or this linguistically identified connection is linked with its alternative. 

I see a window, I see a copying on a wall, and at the same time I see a shade of blue that links the two...to which I say it's a blue shade, without making any more distinction between the window and copying. I regard all of these alternating possibilities as equally valid. It's important to me, in a painting, that two incompatible systems mutually engage. I believe this painting's physicality is the starting point at "understanding" it, and by moving into its spatial volumes there's a guarantee that everything is rooted in negotiable reality. It's then transformed in my mind, which results in the image value. I can only first "develop" the image by leaving this physicality. 

The painting has quietened down; the strokes are almost vertical and executed side by side, all in the same width. My mind rests.

If you're in Paris, go visit one hundred and fifty works by Amadeo, one of the greatest Modernist Portuguese Painters, at the Grand Palais.

NB: Picture taken by me at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in December 2015 in Lisbon.

Can Art Last Forever? : "Buildings" at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

(painting without identification)

When one reads as I do, with such slowness, with the patience of Job, with such love and respect for those who can really write, I sometimes feel that I reach a point in which the bedrooms wherein I read are transformed into public squares, kitchens into churches, and the most humdrum domestic dialogue condenses a poetical mystical outlook, from which frustrated ambitions and broken dreams flow, together with individual and collective frustrations. I imagine it’s very difficult for people, in our society, to attain this process of disintegration. Using the “tools” of literature (poetry is but one of them), the poets create the possibility to confront such disintegration head on.

(Painting without identification)

Art talks about something that’s not there. It’s always difficult to say this, i.e., the art that resonates with me is the one that talks about absent things. I believe the things that interest me in art always correspond to the presentation of an absence, whether it be of a place, an idea, a decision, a lack, an error; it’s always an absence. There is no art without transformation: transformation of its own nature into another nature, one substance into another, one thing into another. It’s also a revelation, always, a revelation of something hidden. In art, that which is hidden is always more important and greater than that is displayed. It’s not an evocation but rather the presentation of absence or something which lies beyond the object. I see art a bit like an apparition, in the sense that one sees for the first time something that didn’t exist in the world before. Art should induce the amazement of the first gaze, the first vision. When I look at an object, either I can seize the moment, the purity of the first gaze of the newborn baby, or it’s not worth the bother.

(Painting without identification)

Everything else is everything else. For me, the difference between art and life is that all things in life are a repetition that’s been going on for many centuries: alL the emotions, dreams, deceptions, acts of courage, cowardice, fear, hatred, love, illusions, disillusions, all forms of violence have already been committed on millions of occasions and continues to be perpetrated every day. It’s always a case of eternal repetition. Art has the power of offering the first vision of something that exists for the first time in the world.

NB: The object above does not belong to the Delaunay Circle exhibition.

NB2: The pictures were taken by me at the exhibition on December 26 th 2015. 

Hein Semke: "A German in Lisbon" at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

The lines of the soldier’s left hand, that almost appear to be wounds. It seems to beckon me to go and meet its author, Hein Semke, who was an almost unknown entity to me. The sense of strangeness came from the juxtaposition of unexpected elements, such as the soldier kneeling. Semke was able to create a kind of world opposed to the world, a contra-world, a world within a world. But it’s difficult to describe this (image of a) sculpture. I’ve never believed in art objects per se, neither am I interested in them. What truly interests me is not their existence as such, their materiality or their presence, but rather everything which involves people’s lives, or their memories, or their future and thus everything which lies beyond their status as art objects. Upon looking at it, I’m left with echoes. 

                                                    (Kameradschaft des Untergangs)

Unfortunately this sculpture was destroyed a long time ago. We are only left with those echoes represented by the picture/image on exhibition (occupying an entire wall). This image on display has a very frontal presence, very self-absorbed, very much closed in upon itself, but it does not have a very palpable existence and therefore it reminds me of everything and everything conjures everything up. But they are only echoes. I stood in front of this man-sized image for a very long period of time. I lost track of time. For me, it was utterly incomprehensible if even it awoke “memories” in me, future or past, or something else.

NB: Pictures taken by me, perambulating the boundaries between Art and Life at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon.