The Reality of Invention

José Luís Porfírio,
Art Critic

Beijing 2007

The distant origin of these drawings lies in a body, a body that possesses its very own gaze and sensitivity, walking by the sea, over and over again.

Then came the first drawings, so close to, yet already so remote from the most recent, now shown to the public; these early productions were presented in João de Almeida’s first exhibition (Lisbon, 2004). They were certainly closer to a traditional Romantic view of the landscape, a landscape both recognisable and identifiable as a very concrete spot on the Portuguese coast that the artist regularly visits.

Besides a constant feeling of movement and change, three iconographic elements dominated that first batch of works:

• Bent trees, their trunks nearly horizontal, moulded over the years by the wind blowing from the sea.
• Rocks (arenites), which once were sand and to the sand return, also by the action of wind and sea.
• Masses of waves and cloud formations, both of them acting as the most direct, most immediately perceptible expression of the movement and change that animate each drawing as a whole.

His chosen medium, pastel crayons used to create black-and-white near-paintings, has since the beginning proved especially adequate to the poetics that developed itself from drawing to drawing. His oeuvre, thus, grows in accordance with that plural non-colour of whites, greys and blacks:

• The Whites reveal the physical presence of the paper, sometimes as incised lines, drawing within the drawing.
• The Greys appear as an endless, ever reformulated modulation of colour, something that is absent here, but which we constantly sense, in a continuous seduction.
• The Blacks, so often relegated to the condition of shadows, intensify their presence, as entities that never materialise beyond the suggestion afforded by the shadow itself, momentarily enjoying their uncertain, disturbing formal and imaginary self-sufficiency.

Suggestions of form and material seductiveness, both present from the beginning, are fundamental factors in the drawings’ constant transformation. The trees have been left behind; vegetable presences are now reduced to a few, sometimes barely noticeable tufts of grass, while the rocks or the cloud-covered sea are constantly changing, taking us to a place of peculiar apparitions. A memory of landscape lingers in the sea-views, while the eroded rocks become increasingly autonomous; our gaze, it would seem, plunges into them with increasing intensity, ever closer and deeper.

These are drawings of drawings, i.e. made from older ones, now in a different scale or framing, increasingly distant from their starting-point, increasingly less like landscapes, increasingly more like entities born of a repeated gesture that ceaselessly caresses the paper. Out of that caress, a body, a form or a constantly changing apparition emerges.

Drawings of drawings, landscapes of landscapes, born of themselves, these drawings by João de Almeida represent, basically, the reality of invention.