Vermelho Cruel
By Walter Arcela
2005
How do barren masses, made up of practically uniform pictorial fields, manage to condense so many mysteries within themselves? In a procedure that concentrates a big bang, where all atomic matter erupts as if in a volcano of sensitive damming, Márcio Almeida's painting provokes a discreet cataclysm, emerging by carving, carving, and carving an arid comfort.
As one of the shifters of what we understand today as Pernambuco conceptual art, by tensioning the boundaries of practices and substrates in affinity with Paulo Bruscky and Daniel Santiago, Márcio Almeida's career crosses multiple languages, experimenting with varied typologies such as sculpture, installation, performance, and object. Despite this multiplicity of mediums, painting persists in Almeida's production as a place of confrontation. The practice never stabilizes, but configures itself as an endless and methodological clash within what the artist seeks to show. Therefore, it is in painting that research, ideas, and the first impulses of questions germinate, which for Almeida intensify through various media.
The Vermelho Cruel series, mostly made up of paintings that guide this exhibition, was born in dialogue with the listenings of the album Azul Invisível Vermelho Cruel by Pernambuco singer and songwriter Lula Queiroga during the pandemic caused by Covid-19. It is a fruitful illustration of central lines of force in the artist's production, namely, verbivocovisuality, an epistemology of error, and ancestry as a methodology.
First, writing occupies a recurrent space here. Not as an embellishment or commentary, but as a compositional axis of the pictorial gesture. It is worth remembering that the beginning of Almeida's artistic career took place as a lyricist, partnering in compositions for musicians. The verbivocovisuality of these sayings, in the terms set by Haroldo de Campos, is the triple substance of the paintings: they are simultaneously read, felt, and seen as an aesthetic object. Almeida has already stated that the genesis of many of his projects arises from automatic writing, straight onto the canvas. Apparently disconnected or discontinued sayings that evoke the human experience of the world across different cultural frameworks: labor relations, anatomy, pain, territory, cultural practices. Even inventing a family of his own fonts, the sayings often give clues to the tone of the work.
The epistemology of error, in turn, appears in multiple ways: the artisanal gestural quality of Márcio's work is evident. It is from this that Leonor Amarante (2023) identifies an "Eastern accent" in his work, except that instead of forming calligraphy, it creates the blotting paper.
The gesture that shapes the canvas is not anchored in calculation, but in improvisation, in the attentive listening to the surface. It thus approaches a musical cadence, as in jazz, where instrument and performer build together. In this process, there is room for erasure, painting over, erasing and resuming, the retouching that is not corrective. Accidents are also included in this series: varnishes that ran down the canvas are incorporated into it, as well as the blurring and dripping of diluted paint, bleeding unintentionality, but deliberately welcomed as a constitutive part of the work. After all, "constructive gestures, for their effectiveness, are paradoxically allied with destructive gestures. One builds at the expense of destruction, in a permanent game of instability" (SALLES, 1998, p.30). Almeida's process, in this sense, shows itself as a permanent act, unlinked to clock time or specific spaces, the result of a state of total adherence to his own practice and a spiral perspective of procedures.
The approach to ancestry, for its part, needs to be understood cautiously: it is not the theme of ancestry that is in evidence. Nor do I refer to a situated idea of ancestry, but one analogous to the terms of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004) when thinking about the idea of a "perspectivism," in which nature is not a single backdrop upon which diverse cultural representations fall; on the contrary, there is only one culture and multiple natures, which means that it is not the representation that varies, but the world itself that multiplies, with common themes and values that precede "civilized" societies. Thus, the ancestry at stake in the paintings does not refer to an iconography of mythologies or worldviews, but incorporates them as logic, or rather, as a methodology. During the 1980s, Almeida made repeated trips to the Amazon, the same time he was studying in the Zootechnics course, which according to himself, brought a profound influence on his poetics, in the way of observing animal relationships, which include us, human animals. Márcio Almeida's painting, in this horizon, does not theme ancestry, but guides its own constellation of interests in a deeply natural way, averse to a propagandistic logic in a body that becomes crossed by perspectives, rites, and materialities—things that speak little, but ask much more.
This conjugation does not organize itself as a fixed structure: it erupts as an untamed flow, woven of fragments, erasures, and flashes, oriented towards the construction of a landscape. I refer to the landscape genre in its full sense, in which the perspective of a background and the presence of elements in the foreground establish a scenic dimension to the composition. These clues suggest an event inscribed in a certain space-time, even if this space is metaphysical, atomic, refractory to ordinary spatialization. Production rises, thus, as refreshments of uncertainty: fields where color drips and pulses, establishing atmospheres in which the gaze is lost and, at the same time, rediscovers the mystery of the back of the eye, as Lula Queiroga says in a track from the album Azul Invisível Vermelho Cruel.
Thus, Márcio Almeida's work establishes its choreography. An artist who, despite becoming a canon in the Brazilian visual arts scene, with a considerable career trajectory and institutionalization, remains in some way in the pantheon of marginal artists—a term here stripped of its pejorative tones, intending to underline the quality of those with a work so singular that they do not fully fit into familiar movements and generations, even though he nurtured proximity to them, following the example of continuously experimental and bold names like Ezra Pound, Waly Salomão, and Jards Macalé. The insistence on painting as an ontological challenge, writing as a subterranean flow, the dialogue with ancestral practices, and the reverberation of musical languages. His work, far from proposing syntheses, opens landscapes where color, writing, and structure blur into each other, establishing a poetics sustained precisely on the tension between confession and secret, surface and enigma, composition and error, music and cadence, until looking at them, “we lose sight of what is not body / and feel separated between the teeth / a thread of blood on the gums” (Ana Cristina Cesar, 2016, p.63).