PAINTING IS STILL, YET IT MOVES

 By Fernando Dacosta

We appear to be before a static type of painting.  However, if we look at it in detail, we feel that it changes as if moving from within.

What looked like stillness becomes restlessness, what appeared to be uniform is fragmentary and what was indistinct, reveals itself to be some kind of disturbance.

Those who dare to enter António Macedo’s paintings are permanently touched by the life they generate. His paintings reveal a kind of movement which does not result from some evident action but rather from an inner tension. That is what makes them outstanding.

Art’s superiority lies in its power to show that we are better than we presume. This is the reason why, throughout the centuries and regardless of political regimes, fashions, techniques and religions, it has identified Mankind; its nature has to do with being, not with having or possessing.

Human feelings, presented in colours and pictorial shapes- that is after all what we are dealing with- become impulses in that enigmatic and slippery spiral.

Each author individually carries the mission (or the dream) to widen the light cast by his particular gaze.

Artistic movements, schools, aesthetics and dogmas do not hamper outstanding artists nowadays. Most of them dislike the compartmentalization and consequent limitations and inhibitions to which Art has been subjected throughout the centuries.

 If an artist is innovative his individual style evolves regardless of installed conventions and refuses to be bound by them. He takes them apart and bypasses them by transforming them.

This is how cultural evolution and creative diversity or reflexive analysis take place. That is also how generations progress in the way they re-think and re-imagine themselves.

António Macedo is highly qualified for this task, to which he devoted himself from an early age in Portugal where he was born as well as in England where he lived for many years.

The exhibition now showing at the Cordeiros Gallery is a landmark both in creative and communicative terms in the vibrant Portuguese cultural life.

Evolution in the Arts does not take place in a gradual fashion as it does in societies. It moves and rebounds in disturbing fluxes and refluxes, arising from unpredictable movements such as the one we are going through now.

António Macedo and Cordeiros Gallery persistently and confidently present what may anticipate future trends.There is the confidence that Art once again will supplant the oblivion, opportunism and the dictates of fashion.

 Each epoch has its own way of seeing and interpreting the world. In cultural terms, this may be taken as being either forward and modern, or backward looking. Truly creative people have to deal with this. They have to understand and preserve the essence of the cultural background to avoid being contaminated by alien residues, opportunistic detritus that infest and infect each epoch.

Emerging out of the humus of Contemporary Art, António Macedo’s work moves lightly forward into the foreground in canvases of the subtlest intimacy.

A second look at his paintings  reveals that much of what we dream of, rave about, search for and renounce can be found there.

We wander through them at a slow pace, and if we allow ourselves to be touched, we are taken on a voyage to our innermost reaches, where we are surprised at our own selves.

His art has that power and Cordeiros Gallery keeps and holds it for its public as a pagan temple would for its congregation; the artist being akin to a shaman/priest performing some mysterious rite in which he unveils something in order to hide it further from view.

Let us not forget that “poet” also means “prophet” no matter what field he is working in.

All mystery is clothed in sacredness.

Natália Correia, high priestess of writing and painting would say: “the rational serves only to draw us to the irrational. Irrationality is what leads the creative mind. Let us pray to it; we are their offspring.”

Alchemy is born out of Painting, fashioned by the plasticity of its shapes. In this catalogue we can but remark and describe it in detail, touched as we are by the work.

There are many kinds of alchemy, not all of them intent on producing gold. In their own way, the Fine Arts produce precious things and if we are sensitive to it, we can find  ”gold” in museums, galleries and collections of all kinds.

As Almada Negreiros used to say: “canvases paint themselves”. They acquire autonomous life and topographies, impulses and music and transcendences.

António Macedo wades in the unfathomable streams of our identity. The abysses he explores lead him at the same time to descend into chasms or to climb to forbidden heights.

His nature does not accept imitations; underneath apparently innocent shades and superficially gentle figures lie controversy and something perverse. It is as if we were looking into mirrors on which abyssal hallucinations are reflected.

Art is not tied to time. Eternity both calms and unsettles, quietening and disturbing those who produce it and are its accomplices.

Art’s magical breath comes from that transcendence.

There is movement in Painting, albeit a silent one and it is a superior form of expression.

In any case, the “higher“arts tend toward dissolution; literature into oblivion, music into silence.

Marguerite Yourcenar once said:” one must love solitude in order not to be alone” and “the habit of being by oneself is an infinite blessing; it teaches us not to depend on people, and thus like them more”.

António Macedo knows he is not treading the beaten tracks. This allows him the freedom to make his own track. Let’s not forget that this is the source of all creativity. Those who do not achieve it end up losing their way.

Ethics, Reflection and Civilization are gains the purpose of which is not just to fill up the mind but to enhance it. This is why the most influential creators are not those who are most visible. A work of art is not made to gain power but rather to heal suffering; not to govern societies, but to improve people.

“Supreme victory is achieved in stillness”, said the authoress of the Romantic Sonnets. “Time dislikes those who seek to overtake it. It waits for them at the end of the day like a wrathful Nemesis wielding its sword.”

Some very characteristic types inhabit António Macedo’s paintings, from the outside inwards, from the exterior to the interior, from the light into the shadows; they pursue destinies we can’t quite see.

Magical and shadowy, they hold some memory, some duplicity unattainable by the uninitiated. They like silence and they love music; they gather around because they got used to their solitude and they feast because they know they will soon be no more.

Conjuring worlds of the Beyond (or Beneath?), the atmospheres the artist creates quickly allow in those who enter them out of  the desire to possess; also to possess his energy and ingenuity, courage and persistence, through the breath exhaled off permanently hypnotic chasms.

Like some frontier between what is visible and what is just sensed ( like those moments just before daybreak or nightfall, peace and initiation, reality and imagination), in his canvases he takes the structure of space, bodies and desires apart until they are irrepressibly transmuted.

To these types, beauty is sometimes so intense that it aches, so deep that they swoon. It is hardly surprising that they reflect such ecstasy and melancholy.

Amazing as they are in their make up, in the way they are crafted and in their detailed sharpness, they are nevertheless striking in their differences and the symbolism they convey.

The fantasy inhabiting the archipelago that makes up António Macedo’s work conjures up visions that are dream-like or spectral; in ceremonies admirably combining the spiritual and the sensuous, the exuberant and the intimate, the youthful and the aged as well as the masculine and feminine.

 Feelings become a second skin. “Our people are purple. They keep on dying of heartbreak and passion, while at the same time assaulting and killing.” Says Almerindo Lessa. “ purple is the colour of jealousy.

We are a jealous people, with a strange way of loving. Though divided, we are consumed with the desire to possess. If not reciprocated, we may succumb to anguish. Worst of all is our lack of happiness: hence the need to unburden our heart and cry. Hence our need to breath Art”.

For us painters are messengers of hope. The task they take on has given them special colours which they amplify in an indestructible manner. Vieira da Silva said “sometimes we paint for ourselves much more that we do for others”.

We have the right to be available inwardly and thus to fulfil out potential with dignity and to refuse becoming robot-like, infant-like, desensitized and unhappy. We prefer sensuality to action, a dream to hard reality, and diversity to linearity. We sailed the oceans because it was much more interesting to dangle our legs off the decks of the sailboats than to harden our hands on the plough. That made us a particularly creative people.

We are a scattered people, conciliatory by nature; we dislike exclusions preferring additions.Rather than “either-or”, we prefer “and-and”; we are Lusitanian and Jews and Arabs and Visigoths and African, and contented to be so, not in the least embarrassed by it.

We became a carnivorous people; anthropophagic (insatiable, crafty, perverse and happy about it) in art as well as in the power structure, in the altar and in bed; in the intelligentsia too.

We are spoken of as gentle people but we are only apparently so. Deep inside there is “a plebeian violence that is scary”, said Unamuno.

“We are like peaches “, says António José Saraiva: “soft, velvet-like on the outside but possessing a hard and unbreakable core. Our Art shows it well!

On the other hand, our deepest wish is to evade reality. Our creative impulses like our mystical attitudes aim at this. Painting shows it particularly well.

Holding creativity on one hand and communicability on the other, the artist opens his heart. “The painters of disturbance are those who create for the Dead; those that have already died and those yet to be born. To paint for the living is to pursue that which is common, not that which is sacred; the manageable rather than the magic” wrote José Escada.

Without that inner restlessness, painting is but a watered-down thing, with no density or tension or movement.

According to Natércia Freire, “we are the offspring of dreams our forefathers dreamt and of those who died in them”. “Our arts have gone beyond the imitation of others, becoming models themselves for others”.

We were born with a fascination for images: a people shaped by sea and mist and influenced by them in our way of thinking and being and imagining.

We were changed by what we came upon and by those who came upon us- Celts, Sueves, Visigoths, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Moors and Hebrews. We are all these and our identity does not fit comfortably within the realm of a specific dream or territory or a continent, race or family. We don’t even fit into one single sex.

The purest and deepest and most representative characteristics of a People are apparent in the works of their creative minds. Teixeira de Pascoaes reminds us: “were there not a Portuguese Painting there would be no Portuguese Soul either. And if this were so we would have to resort to other cultures and become part of the general amorphous mass “

António Macedo has remained faithful to his roots. Wisely, he lets himself float on their energies. Movement in his interior world  became more important than that on the outside. His subjects’ faces appear to belong to old painted panels; they look at us from within landscapes that do not smile at us or sing.

Dead and living share the same body. In front of them, we don’t feel like keeping track of time. If we did we would break the spell, the final dormancy that covers and protects all.

By escaping reality he creates an alternative one. It is easy to believe in it, even to assume it to be the real thing, until it does become real.

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