Approaching problems that concern the landscape, David Almeida’s first solo exhibition at Galeria Millan traverses a range of solutions – from large to small formats; from painting on linen, cotton and wood, to prints and grooved ware ceramics. In all of them the landscape is forged at the limit of signifying; the image is something yet to come, never entirely established, but in continuous transformation before the eyes.

We are invited to travel a path through distinct geographies, between the studio and the world. A nature reserve in Contagem, the Chapada dos Veadeiros, Ubatuba and Cidade Tiradentes, for instance, are among the places visited by the artist in which he renders works en plein air, in the liminality between the romantic landscape of the journey and in direct confrontation with the material world. In some cases, such as the paintings prepared with gilder’s clay base, redness and the soaring temperatures of the drylands and Ceará’s cerrado, together with the ruggedness of the agreste (which dwells the artist’s imagination due to his family ties with the region), encounter echoes of Gustave Courbet’s caves of Franche-Comté and beaches of Normandy. But there are other possible affiliations: Francisco Rebolo, Lore Koch, Amadeo Lorenzato, Miguel Bakun, all of whom were variously interested in developing a space almost bereft of depth and vanishing points, constructed in the tension between the corporeality of the paint and the brushstroke.

The paintings en plein air are exhibited alongside the landscapes created through managing the actual pictorial material itself, without external reference other than the intimate overlapping of memory and imagination. When faced with this configuration, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish what was produced in open air and what was developed in the studio, and this is of little interest. As Merleau-Ponty once said, “It makes no difference if he [the painter] does not paint from ‘nature’; he paints, in any case, because he has seen, because the world has at least once emblazoned in him the ciphers of the visible.”

To compose what is visible to him, this encounter with the landscape is further irrigated by literary provocations and continuing recurrences to memory. Graciliano Ramos, João Cabral de Melo Neto and Guimarães Rosa are among the voices inescapably nourishing the artist’s rural imagination, all of them dedicated to inscribing (and inventing) these drylands, leaving them replete with visual investment. In this interface with fiction, painting expands on its propositive nature, reinforcing the landscape not as an a priori detail, but as a disputed territory between individual and collective spheres. We take off from the assumption that all landscape is a social product, a subjective construction and a symbolic territoriality and, therefore, to reflect on the environment that surrounds us is, above all, a matter of dedicating oneself to understanding our ways of seeing. In 1945, when writing about his emotional past, Graciliano Ramos made explicit the trade-offs between memory and fiction in order to conjure up the image of a place in this beautiful landscape:

“Of this distant summer that altered my life all but scarce traces remain. And not even those may I affirm I recall effectively. Habit leads me to create an ambience, imagine facts, to which I attribute reality. Without doubt the trees were stripped and blacked, the pond dried up, the stable doors swung open, uselessly. It is always like this. However, I ignore that the wilted and blackened plants were seen in that season or in subsequent droughts, and I hold on in my memory to a brimming pond, covered in white birds and flowers. (...) Certain things exist through derivation and association; repeated, imposed – and, in block capital letters, take form, take root. We would hardly paint a summer in the Northeast in which the branches were not black and the troughs not empty. We draw together elements considered indispensable, play around with them, and should we overlook some, the painting seems incomplete.”

— RAMOS, Graciliano. Infância: memórias. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1952, p. 22. [Free translation]

Much like Ramos’ pictorial account, memory clouds the distances between past and present in the extent to which it modifies and resignifies the experiences of old, just as it affects the construction of perception, something which is also expressed in painting. Almeida does not only paint what he sees, but principally what he re-sees and trans-sees; that which re-members, imagines and confabulates in the space between hand and eye. And, to do so, one must lay claim to the memory and imagination as inseparable instances. It is common knowledge that it is hard to imagine without delving, with greater or lesser intention, into the drawers of the past. Imagining (that is to say, expanding the negotiable horizons of the possible) implies engaging with our own experiences and established repertoires. Yet, it is not possible to remember without a dose of confabulation. As Waly Salomão would say, the memory “is an editing room”. Almeida imagines his motherland, for example, but is always fated to construct an-other place. Indeed, it is precisely this “other” of the place that belongs to him in the act of painting, as if it were possible to stretch the horizon a touch further.

In this essentially temporal play between seeing and remembering, inventing and clouding, we pass through a vast range of stimuli. There, amidst some of the paintings, the scorched earth sees the image’s temperature climb to soaring temperatures; heat is felt climbing up from the heels, “arriba do chão”. Soon ahead, the green and dense vegetation leads the path back to humidity – evoking fresh velvet. Fine threads of water scintillate over a rocky outcrop. Transparency in contrast with unyielding stone, but just as Guignard stated, the image fades before the eyes. Rock and waterfall are a single remnant of memory, elements of the same vaporous atmosphere. Fallen branches in an arch (revealing themselves to the painter as one who challenges) make a starting point for experimenting with plastic quips guaranteed by twisted brushstrokes bearing no wish to be hidden. Hot, cold, dry, humid, verdant, abrasive; this is an impossible geography. It is that other of the place, perhaps the reverse of the landscape.

And, if this geography fascinates, then care must be taken to work with the motif without abandoning its rusticity – twisted in character, coming as a reminder of the fact that this is not a nest-world, idyllic or picturesque in nature, ready to harbor and welcome us, but rather a world by necessity in tension, a problem-world awaiting whatever the painter rearranges in it, not to fix it, but to open up a view to a space between us and what it is that we see. For this reason, from time to time, Almeida also opts to paint as one who sculpts – grooving, whittling, modeling, scratching. These are his means of playing with the limits of representation so as to approach the kernel of the material. In the ceramic work, for example, this procedure is radicalized by producing an intimate encounter with the earth, leading subject and support to converge. The rudimentary landscapes suggested here (at times reminiscent of religious icons and shrines, or primitive earthenware) are forged over the mineral base itself, strengthening the state of “thing” in the artist’s incarnate painting. In the exhibition space they are detached from the walls and raised up like totems inhabiting the threshold between painting and sculpture. Soon, however, we also take up the inverse path. Back to painting, where there are examples of drastic leveling, when the artist suppresses the vanishing points, reduces the sky, broadens the ground, before advancing a little further. These are the constant comings and goings of someone who has to call into question their own muscle of vision.

The geological curiosity and fascination for reliefs, textures, and a diversity of natural forms, intimately linked to a taste for pictorial experimentation, also give way to a longing to produce symbolic forms with more defined contours. This is the case of the tiny paintings that recall fragments of decorative tiles with floral motifs or abstract patterns, as if transporting us to an anachronistic domestic setting in ruins. We are not only speaking of an impossible geography, but also of a certain temporal suspension – of difficult localization. Something in this sense can be experienced with the large format paintings, more vaporous, metaphysical and spiritual in aspect. If the ceramics and smaller works more closely approach the density of compacted earth and regional landscapes, then these larger works condense horizons along the limit of abstraction, with more homogenous and mannered brushstrokes and synthetic contours producing a strong oneiric appeal.

Arriba do chão situates us before a body of work which avoids responding to the heat of events (not at all interested in a presentism fenced in by the “here and now”). Quite the opposite: threaded into this is another temporality, one more dedicated to dealing with the present as an extemporary condition. Echoes of the past and rumors of the future condense in these works, perhaps for this reason they carry us in so many directions. David Almeida’s landscapes are the fruit of a material imagination committed to developing its own language: managing its own time and its own place.

— 

“Arriba”, an expression common in the state of Ceará, comes from “riba”, or “ribeirinho”, and refers to the banks of a river. When one says “riba”, it means above, above the high water level, from a high bank. The verb “arribar”, thus, means to “rise”, “go upward”, but always in relation to the ground.