Following half a century of dictatorship, in the last few decades the arts panorama in Portugal has changed beyond recognition. In a poor, introspective and isolated country, books were the easiest form of communication and so had come to be seen as the path to freedom. Portugal still remains predominantly a land of poets and writers. Nevertheless, in the last decade new museums such as the Serralves Foundation (Oporto), the Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon) and the Centro de Artes Visuais (Coimbra), as well as new galleries (Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisboa 20, Galeria Graça Brandão, Galeria Filomena Soares, amongst others), have arisen virtually from scratch. Despite the dominance of the political Right (which has spelled the end, for instance, of the Institute of Contemporary Art), the visual arts scene has grown into a multiple and international arena. Isabel Carlos will be curating the next Biennale of Sydney, and a new generation of artists regularly show their work abroad, as well as in national museums, galleries and art centres. A younger generation including Vasco Araújo, João Onofre, Francisco Tropa, and Joana Vasconcelos is now following in the footsteps of Julião Sarmento, Pedro Cabrita Reis and João Penalva.
One such artist is Jorge
Queirós. Queirós spent seven years in an independent art school in Lisbon
and was taught by a whole generation of important Portuguese artists. It was
during his time at Ar.Co, where he was encouraged to work in a diverse array
of media, that he made the decision that was to shape his future career:
that drawing would henceforth become his primary medium. Or rather, as the
artist would say, drawing chose him.
Queirós now lives primarily in New York, but often travels to Portugal where
he exhibits regularly. In 2003, he was selected for the Latin Union Prize
with three other young Portuguese artists. In the catalogue, he is alone in
choosing not to have a text. It is almost impossible to find out what he
thinks of his life abroad and the importance of maintaining a strong
connection to his country, since he lives just as he works: instinctively.
When one tries to recall Queirós’ drawings, the memory is always fragmented: a body whose head is a big box diluted in a smog of intense, blurred lines; little rooms almost covered by the same graphite fogginess. His working process reflects this mute, fluid and non-analytical tendency. Although each drawing is an enclosed world, there are nevertheless relations between them, since his subjects, and the situations they find themselves in, overcome the limitations of the paper upon which they are drawn. As Queirós put it when I visited him recently, ‘The present drawing influences much more the drawing of the past, than the drawing of the past influences the drawing of the present.’ A temporal discontinuity is forced in this constant re-evaluation of the scenes and the techniques applied to their staging. The more we look, the more the drawings appear like fragments of a work in progress, a continuous testing of drawing’s own capacity to retranslate itself into something else.
The question of representation never comes up. We are not compelled to relate the images to reality, to refer back to the facts depicted (they are both almost abstract and almost figurative). If there is an idea behind the work, a formative concept, it is the absence of a need for representation. ‘I teach myself how to draw, hoping never to learn,’ says Queirós.
In a book about drawing featuring several Portuguese artists, Queirós repeated the same image throughout the 20 pages allotted to him: a man holding a sheet of paper seen from above and behind. Page by page, he zooms in on the drawing, until the sheet of paper held by the man becomes the final blank page. This was not a flirtation between representation and reality, however, but a kinetic use of drawing, playing with the barrier between the observer and what is observed. We lose the drawing once we reach this page, and not the opposite. Instead of creating a link between his universe and the real world, he separates them radically, making the surface of the drawing disappear.
The different scales in one drawing – used to create separate scenes linked by an obscure sense of atmosphere – stimulate the movement of the eye and form an irrational meaning in the imagination. Their freedom relates to the imagination’s capacity for agglutination; not that this is only a question of scales, for he also mixes different styles of drawing. Colour also plays an important part in this superimposition of techniques because of the irregularity of its use, and this confusion of scale, technique, colour, and style establishes a sense of layering, folding and multiplying of the image.
Edward Hopper’s men and women have holes instead of eyes; Francis Bacon’s heads are disfigured. Sometimes, Queirós’s bodies have no face, just circles or colour stains. Whereas his bodies have movement and are submitted to the most awkward, violent and progressive metamorphosis, their faces are turned away, oblique or missing. It is left to the bodies, therefore, to tell the story. They are constantly lost, solipsistic or involved in a process of transformation, forever ‘doing’ absurd and meaningless things
It is tempting to say that the Surrealist’s party trick of automatic drawing is an important reference point to the understanding of Queirós’s work. But however careless the positioning or unbalanced the spread, the kinetics of the composition gives a continuous life to the drawings. His recurrent themes, objects, scenes, and techniques are small testimonies to bigger and wider obsessions, while the spectator is often made to feel an outsider, a voyeur at someone else’s window. And maybe that is really what is happening; why, perhaps, the artist refutes definitive conclusions or absolute statements about his works.
Queirós is currently presenting his
drawings at the Venice Biennale, and here, for the first time, he is working
on a grand scale. When asked how it felt to work with such big sheets of
paper, and if scale was important to him, he replies, ‘I feel really small
in front of those huge surfaces.’ As these works make clear, humour is the
key to avoiding static meaning and retaining ambiguity. In one of the works,
Queirós makes a realistic representation of four slices of bread upon which
are drawn little men. On first impression their eyes, noses and mouths
appear to be escaping from their faces. Then, however, we realise that these
are actually ‘holes’ in the bread. The paper and the slices of bread present
two surfaces: one real and the other imaginary. The paper is the place to
dream (about little men on slices of bread, for instance), and the realistic
surface is the place for rules and lack of freedom. Being drawn, the holes
in the bread could just as easily have been placed to coincide with the
correct location of the little men’s features. That they were not is an
indication that the artist was too busy copying nature, representing it.
Like the philosopher who fell down a well because he was looking at the sky,
at the end of the day Queirós’s ambiguity is a sense of enormous pragmatism.
Joana Neves is a freelance art critic and curator Jorge Queirós, Untitled,
2003, mixed media on paper, 152 x 100.5 cm. Courtesy: Galeria Quadrado Azul