ANTONIO DIAS: AMICI DEL QUADRATO / COME LAVORA L’ARTISTA / SI RACCONTA
AMICI DEL QUADRATO
While speaking with art critic Paulo Sérgio Duarte during the launch of an edition of Serrote magazine, Antonio Dias said in passing, in response to a question from Tunga on Brazilian art critics’ consensus on the so-called “constructive project:” “I’m not interested in making a little square and saying: ‘it’s a square.’ I already knew this at school. Stating what is dark is what matters, inside there is a naked person and you don’t know what will happen. OK, then you’ve already turned the square into a room.”
It may seem like a trivial comment, but he is highlighting a fundamental evocative intensity to reflect on the over five decades of work by Antonio Dias.
It is easy to find the critical irony in a comment on the tautological and self-questioning approaches of concrete art, which can be analogically compared to certain paradigms of conceptual art. As someone who says: “A square is a square,” or he predicts: “A chair is a chair,” Antonio Dias answers: “I already knew this at school,” therefore affirming that the containment of art’s creative and cognitive processes within closed series of formulas and equations can make this art into nothing more than rote copy of technical knowledge and even more so in its lower version (without experimentation and without questioning), similar to reproductions in teaching materials. Yet this criticism does not mean that he would prefer not to “make a little square” – he never stopped doing this. The structuring practices of concrete art, of constructivism and of conceptual art are among the foundations on which he built his work. However, the difference is that he always proposed something that went beyond logical demonstrations, aimed at something else (poetry, pleasure, a game, seduction, call it what you will); for example, imagine a square or any sign that could evoke much more than what it effectively shows.
Here, it is important to underscore: this is about evoking more than it is about showing. This was always his challenge. The first major set of works by Antonio Dias, created from mid-1964 to mid-1968, is loaded with signs and allegorical elements that function as narrative pieces. There are soft and voluptuous shapes painted in red, bones and silhouettes in black and white, indications of an explosion and the icons of weaponry… Yet there are no complete plots, no fables with a beginning, middle and end. From his saturated colors to the outlines, with their strong graphic treatment, these paintings transpire an odor of blood, flesh, sex and saliva – yet who can say exactly what is represented in each of their quadrants? It may even be plausible to establish the debate on these works upon notions of ambivalence and ambiguity, were it not for the titles of the works, such as “a program//getting ready for murder,” “the remains of the hero,” “the executioner,” “note on an unforeseen death” and so many others that hang the loaded interpretations of sound and fury in the balance.
It can be inferred from a first look at Antonio Dias’s production in the following period, which extends from the latter half of 1968 to the end of the 1970s, that all of this evocative effort was placed aside, insofar as the explicit graphic signs in his painting were gradually reduced and condensed, up to the limit situation in his negative paintings, which were entirely black with just one word or phrase in white, adding at most a thin white outline and white paint splatter. That is not quite the case. Even without fragments of libidinous figures, his work from this period is more and not less evocative than that of his predecessors, insofar as the suggestiveness of the works’ titles is brought to the very surface of the canvas, oftentimes serving as the focus of the composition. In these works, with such spartan elements, each detail matters and, in a short circuit with the words playing a central role, it reinforces a type of allegorical, conceptual or critical meaning. On this point, there are various procedures for concentrating and organizing information typical of design drawing, although there is not exactly a project to build, except in the mind of the artist and his public.
In the second half of the 1970s, the production using the so-called “Nepal papers” opened up space to introduce another variable in the evocative equations of Antonio Dias: the meaning of the pictorial matter, recognition of the thickness, texture, color and meaning of the media as an active part of the image. Starting in the 1980s, this attention was added to voracity in assimilation and combination of various attitudes and pictorial factures, in a self-conscious opening of repertoires and resources.
We finally reach the territory from which the works gathered in this exhibition came.
COME LAVORA L’ARTISTA
The first thing visitors see upon entering the exhibit is a painting from 1980. On an ochre background, layers of color overlap and define some icons through cutouts made to the surface, which can be interpreted as a flag with a part missing, an axe and the word “paint” written in characters inspired by Oriental calligraphy. The relationship between these layers and signs is subtly reminiscent of silk screen processes, where prepared screens serve as masks for applying paint. The word promises painting and the process delivers this; yet, it makes use of unusual graphic processes.
Pistol (1986), the next work in the exhibit, introduces some fundamental aspects of the set of work gathered here. It is the result of a collage of paper, no longer the rice paper collected by the artist in Nepal, but the prosaic substance of newspaper. Soft, fragile and disposable, this material is given layers of earthy red-hued paint and is fragmented by cuts or tears, therefore shaping standalone plastic elements that are then glued to the surface of a sheet of newspaper painted dark brown and also marked by a red applied with gestural strokes, almost as if he had been applied by fingertips. The center of the shape that lends its name to the work is left unpainted, leaving the prosaic origin of its raw material recognizable.
As highlighted by researcher Luiz Renato Martins, it is very important to reflect on how Antonio Dias used these resources in the overall context of the “return to painting” that was a hallmark of the 1980s worldwide and especially strong in Brazil and Italy, two countries where the artist resided (in addition to the paradigmatic cases of Germany and the USA, among many other countries). It can be no simple coincidence that Antonio Dias immersed himself in more complex and denser pictorial repertoires during this time; however, it is also not to be believed that what was happening was merely adhesion to a hegemonic repertoire. As is constant during his career, the artist moves closer to the current plastic syntax to criticize it from the inside out. Gestures and pictorial factures multiply, but they never converge in a pure “expressive” logic, which would suggest a direct correspondence between the emotional interiority of the artist and the driven imagery that is freely created on the canvas. For Antonio Dias, adding significant matter always happens in tension with schemes articulating an iconic or conceptual matrix, vocabularies of a thoughtful grammar that operates, as it already had since his earlier phases, based on repetition, variation and condensation of pre-formed shapes, such as the pistol/rectangle in this case, which has a missing part and the rectangular edge/limit that is proportional to the shape of the canvas. In other words, there is a gesture, but this does not obfuscate the logical rationale inherent to the artist’s production.
Next in the exhibit, Untitled (1986) reiterates the graphic and pictorial procedures in play and multiplies them by the accumulation of layers and elements. The canvas seems to make it clear that these are soft materials applied to other soft materials. Next is Furnace (1985) and two Untitled works from 1983. The dominant figures in them, applied to newspaper, evoke architectural plans and territorial maps. Simultaneously echoing recurring signs in his previous work and prescient of the marks common to the artist’s later work, the images establish subdivisions and proportional relationships between schematic forms. Instead of the isotropic territories – homogenous, with clear outlines on rigid surfaces – suggested by paintings and installations since the 1970s and 1980s, conflict zones take shape on top of the soft media of newspaper. Here it is covered up, there it is shown through the velatura of the layers of different densities of paint, the texture of the newspaper text (written in Italian, since the newspapers used by Antonio Dias were from Milan) are first and foremost seen as a chromatic interference and a pacemaker. The informational content of these periodicals can only occasionally be recognized, when some words and partial sentences are made legible. Actually, once again, the emphasis is on the evocative potential of the material and not on its denotative discourse.
The subtitles of this text were completely removed from these rare moments of legibility. It is not by chance that these fragments of phrases serve to articulate this critical reflection on the work of Antonio Dias. For him, art is oftentimes a simultaneous representation and critique of art. Yet it is more than this and is not just a reflection on the artist’s work: it is also an allegory of his time and the political and existential conflicts surrounding him. In this sense, the choice of journals as a media, even when illegible (or especially when illegible), is significant because it weaves a common ground based on the very flow of everyday occurrences, with its most banal and violent facets.
Further along in the exhibit, the Two Bones (1986), Six Spirits (1986) and Ghost (1986) works expand this practice by also implicating another order of silhouettes and signs. As announced by the titles, we can find bones, spirits and ghosts, but great imagination is not needed to also find phallic shapes, organs and wounds. It is the vocabulary of Antonio Dias’s first phase of production that takes the stage, bringing with it a shift in the meaning of the earthy colors employed: less associated with the ground, they are now nearer to flesh and blood.
Ghost in particular is diametrically opposed to the possibility of comparing the painting with a project. The combination of the limp painted newspaper with the thick rigidity of paperboard causes the image to separate from its two-dimensionality. What’s more, some circular points in haute relief are added to the watery textures of paint application and, especially, to blue-colored points that show through here and there, creating the appearance of reactive material, subject to some kind of oxidation, rusting or coagulation – living mass. The effect is completed by the presence of four strips of newspaper painted yellow and crossed two by two like pairs of X-shaped bandages. What immediately comes to mind in relation to these elements are the films from the series on The Illustration of Art and, with this, the impression that the paint could itself begin to bleed at any moment.
SI RACCONTA
The final section of the exhibit contains three larger-scale paintings – Untitled (1983-5), and Labor Berlin (1989) – along with four watercolors from 1985. Together, these paintings form a sort of summary of Antonio Dias’s production, as if they were tables compiling gestures and symbols. At the same time, they serve as a demonstration of the complexity of the pictorial repertoire that interested the artist at the time, with so many variations in materials, surfaces, densities, brushstrokes and saturations, even in such a concise series. Even the compositional model and the way in which the surface of the painting is approached are remarkably different among these three works.
Such diversity can be seen as a signal that although Antonio Dias’s work is pregnant with enigmas, allegories and charades, it is actually a very direct exercise in presenting things and shapes. It is as if it were not important to discover the truths prior to the creation of these works, the artist’s emotions and intimate opinions, but rather, there is a direct confrontation with the specificities of the works and a willingness to be carried towards some new invented, temporary and particular truth – arranged where the eye meets the evocative vectors that permeate the works.
In one of the watercolors, there are two organ bodies that just barely touch. They have an imperfect symmetry, as if they were facing each other in a deformed mirror. The central mass of one is defined by the outline, and the central mass of the other arises from an irregular spot that is later delimited by a red line. The extremity of the first is solid, while the second’s is irregular and aqueous. What do these bodies say? What would we be capable of saying by looking at them?
Keeping in mind the comments of Antonio Dias mentioned at the start of this text, it is important to stress that there is nothing that conclusively differentiates one black square that is simply a black square from another whose inner darkness holds a naked man waiting for something to happen. Even so, I believe that Antonio Dias’s production is a considerable demonstration that these two squares are, in fact, different and unmistakable.
Paulo Miyada
July 2018
