Paulo Meira

“The art of living poetically”
Cristiana Tejo

“…because mystery means nothing…it is unknowable.”
(Magritte)

A painting by René Magritte portrays a man whose head has been separated from his body. He is wearing a suit and tie – a constant image throughout the work of this Belgian artist, which has been interpreted as a recurring selfrepresentation. The man’s head seems more like an orange fusion of sun and moon. This idea is further reinforced by the landscape in the background – a beautiful, steep precipice in a tone of blue composing a gradient with the blue of the sky. This particular piece of work is entitled L’Art de Vivre (1967) – The Art of Living, and always springs to mind when I try to fathom what ‘living’ is all about. There are other available references regarding this particular subject, such as books, music and films, but it is within Magritte’s symbolic, chromatic forces that I prefer to dwell. Maybe my interpretation is unbefitting and somewhat immediate, but it nonetheless leads me to believe that the secret of this journey is not to fear the rocky crags, but rather to recognise its beauty and intensity, since to ignore it would be the same as to stop taking risks and stop living.

I am also pursued by the Art of Living when I contemplate the work O Marco Amador – Sessão cursos, (Signs of the Amateur – Session of Courses) by Paulo Meira. My association here may well be direct/y, but not only, linked to the fact that the narrator of the video is also a headless man wearing a tie (Meira’s direct reference to yet another of Magritte’s works: The Principle of Pleasure), although it is in no way dissembled by Magritte’s work. I would certainly never allow myself to be cajoled into superficiality when examining a piece of work that offers such disquiet and throws up 50 many quotations. Here, I refer to the constant images and mentioning of the risks involved in jumping into the unknown, in exposing oneself. However, this encounter between Magritte and Paulo Meira may also be attributed to similarities encountered in the atmosphere, sense and imagery and not only to the pictorial references of the video (is it not difficult to locate other allusions to artists from other periods of the history of art such as Bruegel or Malevich). Commonly, painting is placed as a constant reportorial source and manner of expression for Meira. It serves as a form of infiltration into other languages, acting in what is conventional/y referred to as the potential of the expanded field.1
It might also be prudent to highlight the artist’s interest in amateurism, the propelling force of the series Signs of the Amateur during which unfolds Session of Courses. Originating from popular knowledge, amateurism finds support in the passion and enthusiasm shown for a certain activity without great pretentiousness or concern for financial returns. It is the very opposite of professionalism – an attitude more and more required by our globalized world. It counterpoints this obligation, and opens itself to whatever escapes from the standard, little by little towards the obsolete, the unthinkable. It also deals with the recognition of conquests brought about by small occurrences and smallscale experiments. The artist articulates the notion of amateurism with that of a sign, which identifies paradigmatic returns to any field of knowledge. We may also consider that to mention amateurism provides the poetic licence to explore the imagery of the artist and a certain nostalgia for mystery and poetry.. Over the last seven years, Paulo Meira’s work has depurated a sophisticated operation of building beauty through the bizarre and the unexpected, within a dreamlike atmosphere. And more recently we have seen the refinement of this intuition with the constant appearance of characters or the atmosphere from the circus. At times, we have seen the slight appropriation of an open narrative of the videogame.

The way of the blindfolded character is torturous and full of risks. Directions are given by a clown (a universal figure, which according to the artist, represents the ultimate condition of the artist2) who provides instructions in an impatient, gruff manner. Despite the sabotage and sarcasm of the guide, the blindfolded man follows the instructions (maybe this is the only choice left to him) tottering across the streams and obstacles on the waterfalls, the winding road, the traps in the woods, the difficulties of the cast!e, the dangers of the tunnel and the tyranny of the abyss. The courses that seem to empower him with 50 much fearlessness speak of the possibilities of how to deal with that which escapes the normal. Those who pass confirm that living is an untaught apprenticeship.

The various stages that the blindfolded man has to overcome are interwoven with a literal jigsaw puzzle. Dozens of blindfolded clay heads, similar to that of the artist, are lined up waiting to be reached. Once again, under the sarcastic supervision of the clown, who explains the route in Italian, the blindfolded man gradually reaches all the heads. But not before missing, knocking into the heads, failing to make a hit, all in a nerve-racking game played precisely and imprecisely. At the end of the route the focus falls onto individual heads, which on being broken release birds3. The risks and the tension certify that the art of living really depends on releasing ourselves from the rules, and through a deep commitment to poetry as a way of accessing the world.

1.This term was first coined by Rosalind Krauss to describe the elasticity of sculpture during the 1970s.
2. Interview given by the artist during the 7° Prêmio Sérgio Motta de Arte e Tecnologia.
3. A direct reference to previous work by Paulo Meira in which birds appear from the artists mouth.

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“The Amateur Mark: session As Far as the Eye Can Reach”
Fernando Cocchiarale

A Perder de Vista [As Far as the Eye Can Reach] is one of five sessions that make up O Marco Amador [The Amateur Mark} – the designation given by Paulo Meira to the near-entirety of his work since 2003. Each one of these sessions is based on a dream-allegory image conceived and constructed by the artist by means of photography or video and in which he is always the protagonist: the artist inscribed as internal observer of his own imaginary actions, his image a possible semantic link between the invention of these icons and their assimilation by the public.

Therefore, the Marco Amador sessions contain the construction of narratives that differ from those of film or literature, given that their construction is not predicated upon the spoken or written word but, rather, in accordance with visual developments that are explicit or derived from the initial images.

The various sessions that make up O Marco Amador signal processes of invention and investigation that are still in progress. Rather than closed sets, they are poetic deposits, fields of specific questions engendered by the powerful images situated in their origins. New works may be added to alI of the sessions. Their processional natures allow for imagistic and thematic-conceptual derivations as well as the use of different types of media including photography, video, painting, sculpture, objects, etc.

For Paulo Meira, O Marco Amador may be considered according to the concept of event: “it is not only condensed in one given event [ … ] among so many others that are part of our everyday lives. PhilosophicalIy speaking, an event possesses densities which are the set of facts that precede and folIow it. The marks to which I refer lie within this set of preceding and folIowing facts, within these densities. Therefore, they may be understood as slight oscillations that, in turn, may (even invisibly) set reality in motion. This is why I use another term alongside mark; it is the idea of the amateur that proposes a form of action mindfuI of worldly things, in a state of perpetual self-discovery, like the Empiricists”.

The organization of the “set of preceding and following facts” poetically constructed by Meira in O Marco Amador are based on this notion of event as semantic-temporal density. From this perspective, his works counter the old idea of a work of art as a finished, definitive event, devoid of preceding and following facts other than the image itself-the work-made exclusively by the hands of the very artists who fix a thing permanently in a painting or sculpture.

Like a significant number of contemporary artists, Paulo Meira appears to have added to the field of the spatial arts (a concept used here not only in the conventional sense attributed to the term but also in the more recent sense proposed by Pierre Francastel when he declares that “all of the plastic arts are arts of space”) the element of time that is characteristic of temporal arts such as music, film, dance and theatre, the narrative sequence of which continuously imposes a progressive evaporation (according to Leonardo da Vinci’s position on music) of its various parts throughout the temporal flow within which these arts present themselves.

There is nothing new about the introduction of the temporal flow in plastic thought. It corresponds in the field of art to an acceleration of the vertiginous dynamics of modern life, present in the work of artists such as Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), whose Bicycle Wheel (1913) may be considered the first kinetic work, given that it could be set in motion by the spectator; Naum Gabo (1890-1977) and Antoni Pevsner (18861962), who first employed the term kinetic art in the Realist Manifesto of 1920; Laszlo Moholy Nagy (1895-1946) who, during the 1920s and 1930s, produced rotary sculptures driven by electricity; Alexander Calder (1898-1976), inventor of the mobile, and Jesus Soto (1923-). Jean Tinguely (1915-1999) and Abraham Palatnik’s Kineechromatic Devices (1928-) provide us with further historic examples of the effective incorporation of movement within the visual arts. This introduction of the temporal flow of the field of art expanded the artist’s possibilities beyond the fixed spatial field to which artistic activity had always been confined.

The nineteenth century emergence of this new notion of temporality in the bourgeois world is therefore related to the technological-industrial revolution and the search for the new as a positive value in itself that mark modernity and modernism, in detriment of tradition. But it was only during the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s – when the modernist emphasis upon plastic-formal investigation underwent a crisis – that the trend towards an approximation between art and technical media that were alternatives to strictly artisanal ones became generalized.

The use of supports, media and materials drawn by the artist from the generic field of life disturbs earlier notions of aesthetic identity based on properties that belong exclusively to the work (framing, formal composition, chromatism, etc.). But this feature is not restricted to art. The contemporary world seems averse to defining roles and identities that have previously been clearly fixed by the specialization and purity that are typical of the modern past. Conversely, our world is based upon the hybridization of elements and traces of lI1any provenances, periods and cultures that favor the interface and transition of identities.

Committed to this new dynamic, the Marco Amador sessions anchor the contemporary quality of Paulo Meira’s work. The core of the A Perder de Vísta session consists of two complementary videos (for one is derived from the other). According to Paulo Meira, the video shows us “an eternally circular movement, the image of a man holding a propeller, a naked woman precariously balanced upon his shoulders … Is it the environment along with the woman, man and propeller that turn or the camera that moves around them? In harmony with this rotation, a series of images of the pair, photographed against various landscapes, parades through the planet’s five continents in a tracking shot of sorts. The speed of the passing images is in sync with the movements of the performance executed in an aseptic environment devoid of any geographical reference. The video soundtrack’s principal reference is the sound of a machine motor that oscillates between a state of near-inertia and the power of total acceleration. [ … ] Beyond video, the installation is made up of paintings, photographs, sculpture, interactive sculpture and interactive objects”.
At first sight, the poetic meaning of these videos appears only to obey the logic of the unconscious and of desire, the operations of which Surrealism exploited poetically. The beautiful, naked black woman astride the neck of the man dressed in black (played by the artist himself) imparts an undeniably erotic quality to the images of the pair. Yet, along with this sensual appeal, their gazes seem to scan possible courses for their displacement throughout the world. And yet they are as still as if they were part of a group of sculptures. Within the specific context of images of the pair, the large wooden propeller (in point of fact a sculpture that is part of the exhibition) that – in the abstract – may be considered a metaphor for motion, performing an opposite role. Held by the man like a staff, it consolidates the fixity of the travelers’ disturbing immobility.

The name that the artist has given to this session is meaningful. A Perder de Vista may be understood as an index of the situation in which the pair finds itself, although it is also undeniable that the title can only be justified by their permanent presence as they regards a moving world (a background) that contrasts with their fixity.

Even as the video scenes and photographs reveal the allegorical-critical content of the artist’s gaze (when, for instance, propeller in his hands, he spins around himself with ever-increasing speed until he drops or when he rotates while standing still upon a mobile circular platform), the public is called upon to see them as part of a dynamic that differs from contemplation, given that installations cannot be observed from an external perspective, as is the case with a painting; instead, they are relational parts of a fabric.

Various media converge to weave the open network that characterizes A Perder de Vista: video, painting, sculpture and interactive objects as well as others-only indirectly referred to-such as the sculptural quality of the double icon and the print (given that the woman’s vagina is eventually imprinted upon the nape of the man’s neck). Paulo Meira’s poetic imagery therefore transcends the thematic-subjective range that, at first glance, appears to dominate his work in order to authenticate or deconstruct certain problems of art itself.

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“Who is Paulo Meira?”
Alice Coelho

Paulo’s battle ground is subjectivity and any approach to his work will gain in substance if it starts out from this assumption. His way of relating to the world is to lay bare his struggle to create himself. But the faces this relationship like someone entering a battlefield, or better, in a struggle for permanence. Not the permanence of a survivor, but that a subject who fights for other ways of living, especially that of the artist. He thus casts doubt on his very constitution as a subject, since the question “What am I?” in Paulo’s work has been replaced, in fact, by “How is it possible to be [an artist]?”

Thus, what Paulo places in the blazing furnace of art, no less than his very own self, as an artist. Far from being an exercise in narcissism or self-referential art, he thereby reveals the body we all have in common, the body we have carried.

Around at emerged in the Marco Amador saga? The body-as-swing, the body –as-helice, the vertigionous body, the falling body, the body-as-other, the stranger’s body, the shadow-body, the headless body. There is no end to the mutation, and is not easy to accept this body, much easier to conform, to develop ideologies, to turn it into language, to communicate. But what goes unsaid when action is taken is the war cry of the bodies that overpower, resist and come through cracks in the walls: the body that goes down into the depths and, from there, cries out and make us quake in fear.

Things that tremble disconcert us, and Paulo lets us see this through his own disconcertedness, because he himself falls to the floor before us (“OMA: a perder de vista”), shows himself as a monster through a black hole (“OMA: 15 minutos no jardim de Alice Coelho”) and throws himself to te mercy of the cruel game of blind-man’s bluff, in wich he busts open his own head (“OMA: cursos”). It is through these Paulos that we come to see the other, which is the artist as subject. And Paulo reminds us how strong the artist is, since only the strong are open about their falls, because these for them are always ways of picking themselves back up again. Paulo falls, bleeds, changes sex, and does not ideologize! Long may he live! He is Dionysus himself. He plays so much with the immutable, literally, creating the charade that is “O marco Amador”.

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“Concerto para final de milênio”
Paulo Herkenhoff and Clarissa Diniz

Contemporary painting in the torrid zone of Brazil has been produced despite the “Northeastern character”, as in other fields. Concerto Para Final de Milênio (2000), and ruddy-orange installation by Paulo Meira, is typical of the deconstruction of post – modernity: among tense steel cables there are elements of traditional painting – nails, frames, canvases – and allusions to things that fly – wings and propIlers. Arranged in space, the elements at once allude to musical “rhythm” – concerto – and dysfunction, conserto [the Portuguese word for repairs which a homophone of concerto], providing a sensation of a moment frozen in space- time, ushering in the expectations of the millennium to come. The power of an interrupted entropy – a sensation of something that has been blown up (parts everywhere), although captured before it disperses completely – seems to speak of a subjectivity in the process of radical transformation while still owing something to structured schemes?

In the atmosphere of movement in suspension of Concerto Para Final de Milênio, the pleasure lies in the colours. The spatialized bright red imbues the air and the body of the other, experimenting with the power of monochrome even when stripped of its modern project of autonomy; a sensation that is also aroused by Antonio Dias’ Coração para Amassar (1966), whose emulation of a semblance of pop creates ambiguities around the meanings and uses of the red, supposedly soft, object in the shape of a heart. Also present in pieces like Alaranjado Via and Os Flutuantes (2001), saturated colour and pictorial logic remain fundamental in Paulo Meiras recent work, including his videos. An emblematic figure is the cIown in the film, Marco Amador – Sessão Cursos (2007), whose paint -daubed face is picked up in the pink painting, The Painter, the Model and the Painting (2008), in which the character’s face appears to be being made up, as he confronts the viewer – or, previously; as suggested in the title reminiscent of Velazquez, the painter himself. This play of forces – between subjects, and between art and the other – takes on great importance in the artist’s latest works. In objects made for aumence participation – such as the playful and violent Omphalós (2008) -and through audiovisual fiction, Paulo Meira enters into dialogue with some aspects of popular and media culture, rereading them in a critical and sarcastic manner through versions and citations that rest, among other things, on the alteration and intensification of the temporal, spatial and chromatic experience to which we are accustomed.