Your voice stays with me inside…Rest, father, sleep little one, I will carry your name and your certainties and your dreams in the space of mine. …I am strong on my feet in this land.
— José Luís Peixoto, Morreste-me

Alex Červený is a great storyteller. Over his career, his artistic practice has produced a body of work comprising maps, landscapes, portraits, and travel stories, permeated with myths, heroes, tragedies, satire, adventurers, gods, nymphs, saints, and queens. Drawing on his personal experience and his time, the artist’s narrative depictions take us on imaginary journeys on the surface of the paper or canvas through paintings, drawings, and prints, the patient and loving gathering of extensive repertoires. Like a wandering, traveling pilgrim, he makes a companion of the gaze of the other, an accomplice in crossing constantly reinvented territories and landscapes. Each image or scene is the result, on the one hand, of patient work with brushes and paint, meticulous in process and detail, contained and disciplined gestures, a delicate drawing, like a tattoo applied on the skin of the painting. On the other hand, a curious, fearless spirit is revealed, with original and diverse imagery, where autobiographical notes are mixed with maps, encyclopedias, almanacs of knowledge, soap operas, music of all kinds, traveler’s literature, archeology, cosmogonies, botany, cinema, books, social networks, and many journeys looking towards the other. It is a generous space of different times overlapping in a collage, full of minutiae and curiosities, intriguing figures and words, something sensual, dense, and spiritual, open to imagination. Nothing dramatic or rhetorical, although sometimes haunted by solitude and melancholy.

To contemporary times, Červený’s art brings the miniaturists’ tradition of medieval illuminated books, of drawings by naturalists and decorators, popular motifs, prints of views and maps, and stories narrated in pictures. They are part of the construction of visuality, teaching us to look at the small things, at representations reduced to their essence, whether historical narratives, pictures of landscapes, of the natural world, or everyday life. But the artist’s tribute to calligraphers is also noteworthy, artists of manual writing, not always noticed but responsible for recording rites, documents, and memories, for writing sacred texts and profane protests, for urban political and social graffiti. Hence the importance of the textual quotations in the works, of the lists of names, places, plants, animals, languages, where the letters are form and drawing in the compositions, forming a lace, a veil over the painting, while the words and phrases function as an entrance, counterpoint, provocation, humor, over the accompanying images on the surface. Červený is a sophisticated calligrapher, instructed on different writings and graphic symbols to the point of writing words backward, a precise and strategic process in the construction of the paintings.

The works brought together in the present exhibition point to another moment in Červený’s production. While in the earlier works, we experienced an elliptic time between present and past in the images and references they brought together, now, time seems suspended, as in the painting of the man in the dark vacuum of the hourglass, surrounded by sand (Clessidra). With a rarefied, dreamlike atmosphere, these works introduce a more introspective, reflective look from the artist on the human condition, time, and place. He proposes: Acercate y oye como va mi corazón; the stripping bare of the soul. He performs a kind of sentimental radiography (Lição de Anatomia [Anatomy Lesson]), a revision of lived time, where legends, myths, and heroes have been stopped or left behind. Ulysses goes back home, old and tired, to live his end with his son, Telemachus, who does not recognize him: c’est moi qui suis Ulysse. The man — the son the father — is alone, as strange as un mono blanco, at the top of the mountain, in the middle of the ocean, of the lake, of arid land, overwhelmed by his memory and ancestry. The body and the past weigh heavy. There is something of lament in phrases like young hearts run free, or, only the strong survive. But there is also irony: like a Narcissus, the man who looks at himself in the lake and wants the body promised by influencers and plastic surgery on social networks (You Belong to Me). There is no bitterness, but a painful, continuous present, melancholy.

As a group, they seem to speak of a rite of passage, from son to father. Continuity, aging, legacy. The big drawing (Pais e Filhos [Fathers and Sons]), with the figure of the son bowing before the father who carries a boy, represents this liturgy. Červený chronicles the present time, the precise moment of a generation, not only of artists, who feel discomfort with the world when looking at the landscape that surrounds them. No longer the joy of everyday life. Not only does the body fall, but all that surrounds it reflects decadence, threat: the environment, politics, intellectual life, the economy, work, war. They are frightened by the perception of so-called “intellectual deficiency” in the transformations and adjustments of the human condition. This is not a nostalgia for the “good old times,” which never existed in history, but a keen sense of notions such as brevity, belonging, inequality, guilt.

In his own way, Červený registers transforming reality with humor, lightness, and poetry, resigned. Houston, we have a problem, the woman screams at the man surrounded by cigarette butts (Houston, We Have a Problem). If there is any dejection, he still finds in his practice the possibility of building bridges, dancing, launching fireworks, flying. He imagines humanity as a concession to the possibility of romanticism. In one picture (Orbis Sensualium Pictus) the presence of a green crocodile, beyond the Caetano Veloso song and the Lacoste brand, recalls the Aztec god Cipactli, a giant specimen who, after being killed in a battle of the gods, has the origins of the Earth and humanity in his flesh. In ancient Egypt, it was Sobek, the man with the crocodile head, who had fertility powers and commanded funeral ceremonies.

A second drawing (Teatro [Theater]) depicts a desert landscape — stones, cacti, leafless vegetation — against a calligrapher’s sky, woven like nets of tiny overlapping lines, where five torso/screw men seem to try to screw themselves into the earth, to put down roots, mark a passage without redemption. Rest, father. Your smile remains in what I do not forget, you remain in me. Father.¹

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1. José Luís Peixoto, Morreste-me. Porto Alegre: Dublinense, 2015, pg. 57, 60 and 61. Published in Portugal for the first time in the year 2000.