It’s painting that is a useful method for photography through the proper

procedures of painting»

Gerhard Richter

« (…) there is photography, capable of demonstrating everything better, there is art history, that has long gone revealed everything, and there are the new media, video, the performance, etc., capable of expressing everything in a more current way. On the other hand, there is will – in it self a proof of the need of painting. All children paint with their free will. Painting has a bright future ahead. Don’t you think?

Gerhard Richter

This exhibition is furthermore a reflection on the place of painting within the actual context of the diffusion of the imagery. The relationship that Modernism, in an elitist way, established between the viewer and the image was merely inactive. Reduced to an aesthetic contemplation this relationship was at stake by post-modernist demands. For the contemporary viewer it is required an active observation, put in to context and also reflected.

As regarding to Lúcia Seabra’s paintings this connection involves a complex process of seduction that in the installation presented by Ferreira de Almeida becomes the instigation of a process of resistance and critics. The seduction reveals itself in the contrasting use of the palette, in the ambiguity of the represented that oscillates between the figurative and the abstract. This hesitation will always depend of the connections established by the viewer upon an imaginary signification. The resistance is found within the permanent questioning of the processes that each data presented by the artist rouses.

In spite of the apparent visual and conceptual contradiction, several elements can be showed to the direction of a relationship between both projects that in a certain moment come to blend in the same space.

FA and LS use fragments of images withdrawals from context, but they do it starting from distinct requirements. To FA photography is the synonym of presentation and LS looks at painting as representation. In the beginning of the eighties, Craig Owens classified this imagery genealogy as “appropriate” for the fact that they reproduce other images. According to Owens, these images where allegorical because they have been confiscated and converted into “something else”¹.

In the exhibited projects the image, set by photography or described threw painting, hides other common element. I’m referring to a flow, a feeling of movement, the “Voyage”, or if we will, to a moment long gone that each one of the projects seems to contain but turns into nothing more than the starting point for other questions. As for FA, the images translate fragments of is daily car journeys between Aveiro and Porto. LS registered through photography various floral specimens, and starting with some details and compositive simulations, produced the paintings presented in this exhibition.

Inside every exposing core, it is possible to build a connection between the different fragments. Both describe a path that leads to the configuration of the place of the image, either that path may be defined with external or critical terms; therefore questioning the processes, the means and their limits, as it happens in the installation of FA; either in internal or narrative terms, as in the paintings of LS. It‘s up to the viewer to identify and interpret these places and to the evidence that starting from these pictures, inserting them into other pictures, the artists creates a complex space, another place to be in. Thus, the allegory comes to form and it’s possible to run through it physically and conceptually. It’s in this manner that the power of the imagery and its narrative potential are uphold. It is also in this context that this deconstructive speech as meaning. It’s not about the bare presentation and representation of a succedaneum of reality – metaphor for substitution – but, the questioning of its own contingency. It’s in this distance that each element gains meaning.

The images are the simulacrum of cultural conventions and in that way their meaning is polysemous – it couldn’t be in any other way. In Death of the Author, Roland Barthes refers that a text [image] it is not a line of words with a unique theological meaning, but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none original, combine, fuse and shock, distancing from the original meaning². Contrary to what might at first glance seem the suggested “voyage” it does not imply a Cartesian pathway……on the contrary. The co-ordinates are important, they define the place, but the way how we read them, how we understand the particular place, its not ruled by imposed representations. The “voyage” is the result of the tension created between the images we see, the shapes we know and the space that we not only see and know, but also feel.

In the project of FA the experience of dislocation reveals itself at various levels: the dislocation per se, which guided the voyages and the captation of the used images and in the process of de-construction in which he submits the photo turned into painting. In LS paintings this same experience it occurs in the sensorial field.

This dichotomy analysis does not intend to put any of the projects on opposite sides. Paradoxically they are both part of the same axle. They both have in common the power of the image of the scenery – while genre and reference, used in a monumental sense and in its detail as well, selected by its indifference, detachment or cold objectiveness (FA) or by its emotional proximity (LS). Probably this is the element that best relates visually both projects.

But it’s in the process of superposition that both differ. In the insufficient display through photography of certain aspects that go beyond the surface of objects, FA critically uses its own photography. It is the application of ink over printing that fills the void. This scheme doesn’t intend to deny the possibilities of painting, on the contrary. The use of white spaces to uniform colour underlines its importance and the pasting of printed papers over canvas, instead of any other surface, enhances even more the previous thought. On the other and, LS starts off with photography as a support –memory but doesn’t brings it to public, instead she chooses a process capable not only to simulate reality but also able to hand over it filled with sensations.

Insisting on an expressive painting, subjective and emotional – last refuge of the myth of individuality according to Thomas Lawson – LS refuses the mimetic tradition of western art, setting apart of the conventional structure of representation. Creating an “image of something more”, she sanctions the conception of art as discursive practice. Her representations have an envision nature either by the communicative ability of the images, and paradoxically, by its ambiguous capacity.