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VOILÀ MON COEUR Adriano Pedrosa
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"Voilà mon coeur" (Here is my heart), c. 1989 Embroidery and crystals on felt, 22 x 30 cm Collection Adriano Pedrosa |
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____Upon writing this essay I find myself returning, once again, to the conditions of production of the critical text. Traditionally, the critical posture, it is well known, demands impartiality, objectivity and rationality form the writer. For those purposes, it is imperative to establish the critical subject's detachment from its object of consideration - which in turn implies a suspension of the emotional subject - as well as to employ reasonable, clear and universal criteria. Quite rigorously, traditional criticism wishes to transmit its understanding through a limpid and crystalline text; it believes in the transparency of (its) language. Possessed by an enlightened spirit, the good critic will shed light upon his object of consideration, founding interpretations and, at last, judgment. Underlying the critical posture is the steadfast belief in truth and in what is perhaps the ultimate task of modernity: organization (of nature, of culture). ____Several of these notions have already been called into question; it is not my task to do so here. However, it is worth drawing attention to the risks one takes when considering the oeuvre of an artist who, having received only sparse critical attention, in now dead. Here, hermeneutics, systematization and organization are modes both seductive and dangerous, and must therefore at all costs be avoided. ____I readily warn the reader: if there is a moment where the limits (I daresay impossibility) of performing criticism remain clear, this moment is now (I write in May, 1995). If there is an oeuvre from which I can not detach myself from, nor secure a distance which allows me to analyze it rigorously and impartially, objectively and reasonably, this oeuvre is Leonilson's. Not only because the works themselves reject such disciplined posture (and if the critical reader wishes to return to the words of the deceased author: "The works are all ambiguous. They don't directly deliver some sort of truth, but show an open vision.")1, but also because I can not (nor desire to) escape my profound involvement with these words and their author, of which, somewhat incestuously in this context, I hold a large collection. I am partial. I do not believe in this medium's transparency. I am suspicious of judgments and their universal criteria, and, like Leo himself, of reasons and truths.2 ____If perhaps my reflecting upon these works may evoke a subject possessed not by an enlightened spirit, but by one reminiscent of the années soixante, in a counter-move, I shall respect the author's wishes - my starting point is his very word. It is not by chance that the title of this essay is taken from a work by Leonilson, probably made in 1989, the year we first met. The small Voilà mon coeur measures 22 x 30 cm and consists of a piece of canvas covered with an acrylic gold paint, with a narrow strip of grayish felt along its upper margin. Embroidered on the canvas with light blue thread are 26 crystal pendants, remnants of a broken chandelier. Unstretched and unframed, the work has three holes on the felt strip - one on the left corner, another one of the right corner, and a third one in the middle - which allow its owner to hang it through nails on the wall. ____Voilà mon coeur was exhibited at Galeria Luisa Strina, in São Paulo, in a one-person exhibition of Leonilson in 1989. After seeing the work, we talked precisely about this act of exposing oneself to the public, a dilemma which seems to haunt the romantic spirited artist. The exposure of the heart evokes Klee's work, who, "you look at... and it's a small watercolor, but he took it from his heart and put it on the wall", or still Jesus Christ, who "took out his heart, gave it to St. John the Baptist and said, 'Here is my heart, do with it you will'."3 However, exposing one's heart is a painful gesture, especially in times of cynicism and skepticism, and often carries ambiguity and contradiction with it. ____In art, the commodification of the heart has problematic unfoldings. We are not (so) naïve: art is a commodity. In the fall of 1989, Voilà mon coeur had been sold, marked with a red dot on the exhibition checklist at Galeria Luisa Strina. How does the artist, the one who exposes his innermost, bear such commodification? "It is your heart hanging there on the wall," I told Leo somewhat mercilessly and naïvely, "you put it for sale." I returned to Rio de Janeiro and a few days later, on the mail, I found a FEDEX package. In it, a small gold and crystal work. On its reverse, I read: "Voilà mon coeur, il vous apartien [sic], ouro de artista, amar bastante" ["Here is my heart, it belongs to you, artist's gold is to love a lot."] ____The heart is the oeuvre's dominant and recurring theme. The heart as the muscular organ pumping blood through veins and arteries, the vital center of emotions and sensitivities, the repository of one's deepest, sincerest and most intimate feelings, and ultimately, the place where unreason and all its ambiguities find comfort and refuge. Abysses, anchors, atoms, books, boys, bridges, clocks, crucifixes, deserts, eyes, fires, flowers, globes, hourglasses, islands, knives, labyrinths, ladders, lightnings, maps, mathematicians, mirrors, mountains, oceans, organs, poems, pearls, ports, radars, rivers, ruins, saints, spirals, stones, storms, swords, temples, urinals, volcances, waters, wings - everything points to the (artist's) heart - running from, through, or to it. I return to the pretensions and conditions of productions of the critical text: here, to engage in a project of establishing signifying nexuses seems if not superfluous, at least doomed to failure. If, on the one hand, naming is not in itself a facile task - Tempestade no coração, abismos, fendas e relâmpagos, que nome estranho dão a isso? [Storm in the heart, abysses, breaches, lightinings, what strange name is given to that?]4 - on the other hand, each element of Leo's vast lexicon militates against dictionarization. ____Indeed, in Leo's speech, ambiguity is a key-word and it closely followed by dilemmas and problematizations.5 The artist of amorous spirit will perhaps resist having his innermost being exposed to the public. Perhaps not. However, he will certainly be confronted with the dilemmas of its commodification. I recall Rothko who, after concluding a series of paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, refused to deliver them - the works are now in the Tate Gallery, London. I recall Rothko, even, because Leonilson has something of the abstract expressionist impulse: the desire to mark the expression of subjectivity. The fundamental distinction here refers to the heroic scale of those modern masters, in opposition to Leo's quiet and intimate one. (Like Pollock, Leonilson would lay the canvas horizontally while working on it and only hang it on the wall when it was finished. Unlike the North American painter, his canvasses were laid not on the floor, but on his work table, and were therefore always limited by the size of the table-top). Moreover, in rejecting formalist purity and order (in his peculiar choice of colors, for example), Leo was positioning himself with skepticism regarding late modernist abstraction - neither figurative nor abstract, these classifications fail to account for his works. Between the Rothko of the forties and the fifties and the Leonilson of the eighties and nineties, there is a crucial rupture: the unreasoned thoughts of the années soixante and all the deaths which they announced. ____Once
the death of the subject and of the author (which will only find
full reflections in the visual arts in the eighties), is written,
what is left to the amorous spirit? Leonilson's response both crosses
through and carries over the heart - the artist's gold is, after
all, to love a lot - with all its treasured ambiguity. In Voilà
mon Coeur, author-heart-artwork is offered not only to its owner,
but to its spectator as well: "here is my heart", announces
the title. But in a subtle dialectics which invite and repel revelation
and disclosure, it is only on the piece's reverse that, in an acute
irony of the artist, lies the intimation: "it belongs to you".
A small object of crystal and gold, fragile and precious, may be
shattered by its spectator, and that is where the dangers of exposing
oneself to the public resides. Here, the amorous spirit (ever irrational)
persists and, despite its fine and cunning devices, surrenders at
last. Between voluntary servitude and perverse innocence,6 it affirms:
O que você desejar, o que você quiser, eu estou aqui,
pronto para servi-lo [Whatever you wish, whatever you want, I am
here, ready to serve you]7. In the end, the heart, like everything
else, points to death. The heart may be the leitmotiv, but in the
infinite chain of metaphors, death is the ultimate signifier. |
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NOTES 2 Leonilson, in a work from 1988, writes: "são tantas as verdades" ["so many are the truths"], and in a title of a work from 1991: Para quem comprou a verdade [To Him Who Bought the Truth]. 3 Leonilson, in the interview conducted by Lisette Lagnado. 4 Leonilson, in a title of a work from 1991 5 Leonilson, in the interview conducted by Lisette Lagnado, mentions "ambiguity" some eight times 6 Leonilson, Perversos inocentes [Perverse Innocents], 1992 7
Leonilson, in a title of a work from 1991 |