Gustavo Speridião

‘The shape Speridião looks at: the plane, the circle, the cut, the window, the step, and the cloud’.
(On Estudos Superficiais (Superficial Studies), by Gustavo Speridião – Part 1)
Guilherme Gutman

Intro.
This film dates back to 2013, but has been running for many years. This text is about its first five minutes. The film contains many ages and does the inventory of many other events. It is thought at the same time as it is performed, being both – thinking and action – matured by effort and chance, which, after all, life presents to Gustavo Speridião. His attitude towards life – since he lets himself be affected by it – is everything but contemplative: Speridião pursues his object and – at a high cost – shapes his own way of life. As he leans his eyes upon
things, Speridião is a special viewer who walks about attentively, choosing and capturing fragments of things that, from within, impose to him a number of shifts. This movement produces an amalgam that ultimately does not distinguish what is created from what is lived. Before all these rich joint elements, without compromising on a broader view of the large vertical and horizontal extensions of the work, it is worth multiplying this text into parts, since the film itself is plural. This work, although made of the rest of what was lived, has no leftovers; everything that is in it should remain in it, just like what can be found in the works of someone like Bárrio. There are poetic elements in the film, but this is not its hallmark. In spite of its sublime atmosphere, enhanced by a beautiful soundtrack, this is all merged with the unpredictable sounds of the street. Thus, we obtain the paradox and the polyphony of mundane bliss or of a world where beauty is born from taint. Are there poetic elements in the film? Perhaps, alternatively, the film is about “not having poetic elements,” since everything is poetry, depending on who sees, chooses and capturers it. There is certainly plenty of beauty in this film, but its fundamental question is how this beauty is attained. We might think that its start point are the abundant sequences of geometrized shapes, in which beautiful and insistent geometry strolls across the polis to get to some sort of core of things, albeit through side roads. Speridião walks about the outskirts of the cities and, with the view of a camera’s diaphragm, he finds something on which to lay his eyes, thus producing the image that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. But how can one be convinced that this work achieves something real? Well, one must be exposed to it, look at it and be looked at by it, with the voraciousness and the veracity of the fast- passing light through the camera’s mechanisms, which make such work fully explode before one’s eyes.

Therefore, the viewer’s position is not sufficient for a total experience: once we have seen the video, we start being looked at by it. And for an undetermined time. This work has its own temporality: it starts before the recording of the images and proceeds – endlessly – in the effects it causes. How long does it take to finish a work? Beginning a painting does not necessarily mean being on it. There are paintings that took 10 years to be finished, whereas others, remaining at the workshop for a long time, are at risk of stretching their time at this captive space for too long; perhaps a little like a son who lives with his parents and only realizes that his time has passed when it is too late. Speridião relentlessly adds life to the canvas, scribbling, tearing the surface, doodling, painting over previous layers… Until he finally has to set it free, release it from his workshop so that it can exist and go its own way. This film took 7 years to be completed; Speridião took a long walk about 18 cities to find its images. This first essay about Estudos Superficiais (Superficial Studies) focuses on the video segment that starts exactly 27 seconds before the title, that appears shy and solid on the black screen, and finishes with the cut, embodied on the screen by the images, sounds and smells suggested by the Portuguese butcher shop. Therefore, the first text ends with the cut in the flesh, in a poetry that will soon become another, like the one in his film Os Inimigos (2008) (The Enemies – 2008), in which one can read: “What I want are words full of fire, truth and rage. Words sharp as a dagger, burning like torches. What I want is to throw it all on the public. Throw it with terrible generosity, so that people catch fire and start to scream, run (…).” The second text – yet to come – starts with the daggers and the torches. It starts with our willingness to push away with our hands – either steady or trembling – the metallic curtain with the word “gash” painted on it with no refinement. It is as raw as the sight that necessarily awaits those who cross the threshold of the butcher shop – also a metaphor of the world, separating the life one fantasizes from the real sight of the bodies. We shall come inside, but let us not make haste.

Life mixed with work.
When one thinks about how Speridião’s life and work are intertwined, it is difficult not to think about the position Foucault adopted in The Use of Pleasure. From this perspective, it only makes sense to investigate, build a philosophic corpus, intervene in the screen and create a work if it can make us think about the life one lives as opposed to the life one could live. Thinking about Ontem, hoje, amanhã (Yesterday, today, tomorrow), hunching life over work and enabling such work to flow back into life helps us understand one of the sources of Speridião’s work: gently or harshly, generously or angrily, he hands out a way of life to those who are willing to see the rip on his paintings (Fontana) or read the record of what was lived in the spontaneous fluidity of words and sentences sprayed on the surface of the work (Basquiat.) In the same gesture, they are the shameless words on a restroom wall and the private pages of a personal diary. The Speridião who collects sentences then becomes equivalent to the Speridião who collects fragments of past experiences with friends, in conversations, trips, affective relations, in whatever he sees and hears at urbi, orbe et mens. But how is life combined with the insistence of basic shapes in his work? At this point, as far as I’m concerned, we have one of the key elements of this film, in particular, and of his work, in general: his interest in “non-human” shapes outlines his enormous interest in whatever is human. Life sprouts from his circles, his squares, his triangles, dots, and lines. His Estudos Superficiais (Superficial Studies) unfolds the creases of cerebral spins and stretches the canvas, the skin, and the pellicle upon which the dreams and the anguishes of the abysm of the heads are poured. That is his geometry. Life comes in and out through the rip on the canvas, through the opening of the shutter, until the image touches the body. In the first scene of the film, a man in a turban guides the eye of the camera to a chamber where we can see the object – concrete, geometric, solid, static – next to some steps. Previously, this man had crossed the geometries cut in stone, passed by a white board over a black background, in a construction of light and shade. Finally, in a strange language, he presents the object: a rectangular volume. The man’s voice is strong, but the emphasis in his utterance also reveals the bewilderment of a discovery. For one moment, it is as if we were foreigners penetrating the secrets of a building with high archeological value, like tombs or baths. However, it goes far beyond that. It is just that the man knows that the impact of the discovery is not only the present value of what he sees. And looking directly at us – his interlocutors – he tries to make sure that through the oblique slit of our stunned eyes we grasp his discovery: that a basic and pure form explodes concrete limits, turning solid into fluid and opening bypasses to the banality or the mystery of life. We notice that Speridião is familiar with the work of Mira Schendel, that he watched Dziga Vertov and also Chris Marker, that he listened to Malevich when the latter says “all the strength (…) comes from pulverizing and decomposing the object (unlike its plenitude.)” In this short preamble that precedes the title of the film, there is a synthesis of what will come next in the work: we direct our naked eyes to the basic and pure shape, just like in Black Square (1913-15). We are looked at by its surface and we see it releasing the gaseous, ethereal and vaporous matter that make up human life and experience on Earth. All this might last only a minute, but Speridião puts his entire life in this minute. As he says: “We all live but a few minutes. The best is always in only one minute” (Os Inimigos) (The Enemies).

The lost object.
There is an enigma in the image of the living man before the solid and static volume, a volume that will remain there when the man is already gone for good. When will they leave the scene? Landscape.
When will they be dismissed: Hoje, Ontem, Amanhã (Today.Yesterday.Tomorrow)?
What remains when the object – the person, the idea, the painting – are gone? There is life with and life
without, in a permanent transit about the mesh of contact, in the mosaic of togetherness. After all,
what is left when it is over? When people part and are no longer around?
How to deal with what once was but is no more? In what was done, in the appearance it had, in what was lived together. When people part – for a second or for the rest of their lives – we come closer to one of Speridião’s geometries: the “gash” or cut, which is sometimes on the flesh and sometimes on the canvas. A cut that precedes each new and necessary separation. A gash that starts the parting, the emptiness that comes from it and establishes what one will pursue over life. At the same time, it pushes one back to life towards the region where he will face his challenges, indefinitely recovering and losing the object that bears the vain promise of a mythical plenitude (Freud). In the film, the circle appears many times: gelatinous or luminous, metallic or stony, kinetic or lunatic. There the cut is in the eye, dividing the gaze into two: one that looks and another one from which we feel looked at. It is this split that might restrict the experience to some sort of visibility of the present, when it could (should?) move towards what is not there and escapes the tamed eye (Didi-Huberman). This lost object is not in the routine, sensory-perceptive visuality of what is seen now, not only in that space between quasi consciousness and the creations of the unconsciousness, but also beyond the surf zone – as suggested by the specific materiality of photographic records (therefore, in a materiality that fails, that lacks something, that limps due to its very essence.) Mar Egeu– between the core of the Real and this set of syntaxes that closely relates to the Symbolic (Lacan). Of what substance is made the lost object then? What remained of the photographed object? In some virtual space between the object that “was there,” its capture by the camera, the printing on photo paper and in Speridião’s memory of the object? Perhaps a fleeting memory of the creation process that one day will also completely disappear. Let us keep the minute, which is Speridião’s time: that more ethereal temporality, which is dust, smoky, misty and geyser. The matter that makes what is left, what is no more.

Life – tough and beautiful – appears as shape blossoms.
Speridião looks at shapes because he is looked at by them. This is one of the key points of the text. Speridião’s geometry: circle, square, triangle, dot, and line originating – or, to the contrary, shapes where one recognizes the things of life – the vegetable and animal world. Another key idea: the more difficult reality is (in many senses: social, bonds between people etc.,) the more the dream, the poetic, the “unworldly” must find their place in the work. In Speridião’s case, by removing/making sprout from these hard matters – per via de porre and per via de levare – everything that crosses us and that is not limited to beholding the object (like the compact and rigidly outlined volume presented by the man at the opening of the video.) A formula: a dream (dream-like images, reveries, artificial paradises, images that come back, reminiscences) that emerge from basic shapes. This first text marks out the scene in which the images come about. In this sense, we have the basic elements of Speridião’s geometry:
A) The cut (gash), which in the following essay will present the “flesh of the world” (Merleau-Ponty).
The undividable separation between a body that sees (which, ultimately, sees itself and is paradoxically
object of the world, to be seen, chewed on and swallowed.)
B) The cloud, which is what is seen when the emptiness is seen (Didi-Huberman). Life is here. From the
shape spring vegetable and animal species and humans with their small things.
C) The step, which must be climbed up, stepped on, so that one can actually see (the step is the stone
volume, the square, the geometrized matter.)
D) The circle. The eye that sees is the eye that looks at us.
E) The window is what one crosses. The rectangular openings, the gash and the slit. It is through the
window that one comes in, but through the window, it is also possible to dismiss oneself.
F) The plane (superficial). Surface: the necessary support to nest the work. It can be the canvas, but it
can also be the ether: the mental space, the conception etc.

Coda.
Speridião makes way and in the opening, in the rectangle to be crossed, in the cut in the flesh or on the canvas, we find that minute that is as precious as it is fleeting. When we look at a work by Speridião, we celebrate and remember that we are here. The emptiness started by the cut, the left space, and the suggested surface continuously look at us, guiding our gaze. The core of the thing might be in the transition spaces between the groupings of “Speridian geometry,” worked on at the editing room. Groups and transition spaces among them are presented, making us feel somewhat uncomfortable. In this discomfort, we leave the studied surface, paved by the groupings. In the transition spaces we no longer have the comfort of the object to be found, we don’t know where to look for the circle or the step and we feel simultaneously lost and encouraged to look for the next thread. On our own. In the transition space among the groupings, we must hold on to the stones or grope around the walls, looking for a new exit in the dark. In this space, we test and collect everything we see inside the presented images, trying to match “pairs,” like in a memory game. There, we dispose of what we can’t find, we keep what was repeated, so that we can make sure that this is the safe path, in the following image – until with undeniable relief we have the object in our hands again. For about a minute, let’s let Speridião show us what he could see and generously reveal through the slit of a diaphragm.

***
Guilherme Gutman is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, psychology professor at PUC-Rio, independent curator and art critic.

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‘Atlas’
Guilherme Bueno

The world as an encyclopedia. After all, which modern mechanism best delivered the function of containing it all? The collection of books? The cinema? The Arcades of Paris? The Crystal Palace? The Universal Exhibitions? Today, it is current to realize how much Walter Benjamin detected this symptom by collecting everything that seemed to exist in his unfinished work of the Arcades; as if in them, a microorganism, a fetish diorama, were offered to us, within a hundred steps, all. However, this all / whole had its rules and, mainly, its price – which was, indeed, the greatest rule of them all. Just like knowledge, desire becomes the capital’s vestal, making up the peculiar genesis of modern image. We, therefore, have got two principles at stake to configure in it: its use value, which is not but the type of power convened for the image; and its editing, builder of its sense. Consequently, there cannot exist a policy of images that isn’t, at the same time, a policy of editing. In times of hiperexposure and of attempting to build of a globalized content, the work of art finds itself exposed to the strange urge to respond with objects and images to an ever more competitive and coercive demand, incurring, often times, a “compromising aesthetics” marked by the pasteurized and conciliatory language. Hostage to an adjustment that is passive to the system, the artist adds a “local” – and “personal” -“touch” to certain molds taken as universal (and this universal is determined precisely by the editing principle), thus, creating works that naively reify the conformist compliment to the “glocal”, to the precarious, to a pseudo micropolicy of the “possible” and of the utopic. Estudos Superficiais (Superficial Studies), by Gustavo Speridião, chooses a path opposed to that. His interest in cinema, which dates back to the camera-eye by Vertov, herein, becomes a camera-body. This, however, is not illustrated in a direct reference to the body, but, rather, in that in which the scopic desire to appropriate the world is present in the feeling of sequence of one single breath. The images succeed in a stream, where the claim for his authorship is not a prerogative of the artist- individual, that is, of the craftsman that holds exclusivity for the handling of the work, but that of the artist-subject, in other words, of whomever earns their emancipation by wanting to print their codes, their experience, upon the contingencies of the world. It is a case of absolute: not a metaphysical absolute, but an existential porosity and, consequently, a political one. Political, for that matter, is not herein an abstract denomination or an environment jargon; it is, rather, the anti-conformist engagement that, in its critical positivity, instead of a metaphorical or resigned content (almost an allegoric one, since allegory goes hand-in-hand with the assertion comfort of “utopia”), arises as a concrete and actual experience, calibrated in the direct testimony of the dilemmas witnessed worldwide. The intervention upon images, quotes and collages exists sometimes – or simultaneously – as an iconoclastic gesture, sometimes as an examination of the historical fabric of a language (be it painting, film, ideology, etc.), sometimes as a kind of unusual flow of the Joycean- constructivist consciousness. One assumes the materiality, not only physical, but also historical of the objects and the linguistic and discursive mechanisms constituent of the idea we have about “Art”, which, in the end, has never really existed apart from the superstructure under which we live, but in which we do not feel necessarily, or by any means, comfortable. What are, after all, these Estudos Superficiais (Superficial Studies)? A copious book, a trip journal, a museum of a single man? A bit of… all, they must be seen to the same extent as an extension of a former work by the artist: O Circo dos Sonhos (The Circus of Dreams), made in co-authorship with the members of the group he used to take part in at the time: Gráfica Utópica (Utopian Graphic). If O Circo (The Circus)… held a touch of amalgam of historical vanguard movies with b movies, amazement and performance guided by the constant showing of his “characters”, in Estudos Superficiais (Superficial Studies), these are two and one at the same time: the world and its image. As we mentioned above, one does not exist without the other, and the flow emphasizes the ideology that is inherent in them. The question, nevertheless, is the resistance power of the work, in other words, the ideology of the image, as we insist, stating itself in its indiscipline to the system it attends, leaving open, at times, how it belongs in it. Gustavo does not fetishize or sweeten – under the mask of an enfant gâté, as is seen repeatedly along the way – the system or the circuit; hence his disconnecting the relation between work, transference – also in its psychoanalytical sense – and possession, that usually define the conditions of the work of art through its open public availability. In this aspect, the appropriation and the power of free circulation both of the image and of the work itself get intertwined, thus, granting the work yet another kind of materiality, since it goes beyond the filmic mechanism – the object-film itself – and incorporates in its consistency its divulgation and sharing schemes, as if admitting its viralization. At the same time, it gives back the film its visual breadth and width, just like this world encyclopedia returns to its original object of reference.

The history theater play. The visual history theater play. Estudos Superficiais (Superficial Studies) is a hypothesis: putting Rodchenko on the same editing board as Entr’acte or Ballet Mécanique. After all, what is left of specific in the image when it is put in the large bag of
history, when, in a case such as this, all the differences are reduced to the shallow classification board (because today, they all have been reduced to being just modern, meaning, subliminally, that they are finished)? There could be two answers to that: radicalizing more than the
temporality or ephemerality (of the experience or of the work that should prolong it, thus, impacting its productive condition), that is, radicalizing the terrifying and inexorable historicity – or loss of historicity – of things; or, maybe, reinserting its potential as a narrative suspension (if they reenact a visuality, it is not as a parody, but, rather, as a repetition – once more, admitting its psychoanalytical connotation – as a derepression situation). In that case, I would say it is about a “collective derepression” repressed in the various elegies of modernity, nowadays, more revered than ever. If the guide of images is made up of visual analogies that gradually configure narrative anamorphoses, it is no less than a history that, mocking its Hegelian pillar, overlaps the archaic objects that came into existence prior to or that sit at the margins of history, with its persistence in the present. Just as the discursive time of history is put at stake, it becomes coextensive to the “natural” time of the cinematographic editing. Interestingly, we are faced with the necessary anachronism of a modernity founding crossroad: the Manetian disorientation of the viewer. Nothing more imperative in times of guided contents.

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‘Pictorial Skirmishes’
Guilherme Bueno

There is a history of painting in these works. There is a history. There is History. We must always repeat how much contemporary visualilty was built questioning the ordering terms of its imaginary. Its “post”-modernity lies precisely in the confrontation with the references that
forged it in diversified manners, including in the trauma of finding itself within a universe where everything is recognized as discourse and by disengaging from nature founds the death of transcendence. Such psychoanalytical archeology of the regard is the critique of mediatic
reason. We may state, before Gustavo Speridião’s works, that in them such archeology conveys the very materiality of things, whether they are canvases, photos, films or objects. But it is a bit ambiguous, because instead of celebrating the melancholy of a exhausted and decanted space, it questions whether was repressed of it by the present, opposing to the wellbehaved jargon of a world that allegedly consensually resolved its tensions and where whether creates friction becomes history, “utopia” and metaphysics… An underground work, for it brings to light that which was destined to be repressed, a kind of unnamable discomfort. A foreign body, for it has many skeletons (all histories coats it), some purposively turned into phantasmagorias through the apotheosis of counter-historic triumphalisms. However, we must make a reservation in order to properly consider them: the presence of this world, whose turbulence – more than being kept nowadays – is always actual, is not the same as to say that this randomic encyclopedia of images is there conveyed as a pictorial matter, for, if this was the case, it would betray itself, turning its dilemmas into mere formal arrangement and nostalgia. Here, it means to confront the temptation to once again mystify art. In other words, to insist in producing art is to contradict the established common sense concept of labor and production, based still in the neutralization of art as an activity of the spirit (if there is one) detached from the accidents of the world. Gustavo draws an alliance with these accidents, perceiving them as the most effective data of reality. To confront history and art history is also aligned to the quantity of layers that depart from the eye and rebounds on the canvas. If in modern painting Cézanne took on, for instance, the challenge of “painting the air”, that is, to inscribe from the eye to the chosen motif the spatiality constrained by the limits of the canvas and the articulation of things (the invisible but factual volume interposed between the objects), Gustavo declares: the are is – and perhaps has always been – polluted. Air du temps. The Duchampian air de Paris is expanded in his canvases, whose “atmospheric painting” talks of all flaming airs throughout the world from the moment when this text is being written to the moment when it runs through the reader’s eyes. Indeed, they are always burning, even before we were born. Gustavo’s works do not convey a moralist criticism; they are works of facts. In it we find the incorporation of the most diversified references: Hogarth, Courbet, Malevich, Mondrian, Chris Marker, the flayed and graffited walls of the streets. This urban – and so realistic – character is manifest the whole time. Like a story – specially this one told by him – things are not installed a priori, but done so in a processual way, through frictions, affinities, correspondences and extensions of from an idea to another; a painting – here also in debt to another modern trademarks, automatic writing, Pollock – which is a plan (a strategy), but not born already designed. It gathers, devours itself and keeps a degree of subversion by refusing to obligatorily fulfill its plastic destine (the work’s “teleology”), in its refusal to warranty in advance the certainty or security of a well-accomplished and efficient realization. When exhausted (a better term than “closed”), in its inner space, it expands in the way through which it conquests its space – the thick framework (or its absence) places the canvas’ weight, its objectual volume, in space. It is assembled there, imposing itself as a wall, a barricade. We can observe, for instance, how it explicitly remits to the manner how Malevich or the Bauhaus conceived their exhibitions. It’s the choice to appropriate a decisive chapter of the great battle of the eye, an eye necessarily political since it broke down the line of the horizon. Such issue permeates Gustavo’s work, that understood it should not hesitate between a – lets say more “heroic” – creation, the most stunning vertigo of yearning and the risk of being perceived as propagandistic. Not to fear being propagandistic in certain moments (part of the 1960’s production understood it quite well and gathered strength in this crossway) meant to confront art with its relics, its Papal and eternal infallibility, to think it could grow old, even against its own will. To opt for painting, in this case, is to cross a field permeated by accidents. It’s to confront the ill-resolved idea of death (of history, of art, and all others that haunt many of us since the French Revolution). Its ‘color diet” goes beyond the modernist actions of forcing the limits and dissecting the cadaver of the plane; it’s the dislodgment from an aesthetic palette to a graphic one, or still, from the color of the metropolis, to, in the last instance, the dirty color of the world. Its colors are equally historical: reduced to a limited range, they are at once the double memory of the constructivist audacities and, within a more familiar circle, the expressionist solitude of a Goeldi, for instance. But also, in order to unsettle the spectator, they allow themselves to be something else, like, for instance, the “dirtiness” of the protests more or less anonymously verbalized in the walls of the four corners of the world. And, above all, something that we perhaps can only indicate here as the metaphor of a “pictorial pornography” – its politics and visualilty are pornographic because they do not restrict neither the eroticism of the (aesthetical) sensual/visual pleasure nor discomfort or unsettledness. This is accomplished not only by the rawness of the different images engaged in the works, but equally by the shocking quality of their promiscuous narrative of revolt, horror, enthusiasm, pleasure, tedium… spleen of the globalized planet.