In art, and in painting as in music, the question is not to reproduce or invent forms, it is to capture forces. This is the reason why no art is figurative. The well known formula of Paul Klee “Don’t paint the visible, just make it visible” has no other sense.
Deleuze, Lógica da Sensação
How to capture the forces that form us? How to lock in one image the sensation imposed on us by forces that deform us more than they transform? The purpose here is not to represent their effects, in the multiplicity of elements that by them are composed and decomposed; the purpose is to return the convulsion that overwhelms us when we find ourselves immerse in the fortuity, unable to discern in us the inner from the outer, what in us is commanding from what is commanded.
Then an intense sensation arises: the moment we are submersed in a close fight with the universe. Around us the whole forces of the cosmos. We as part of the forces of nature. The thin line between profound darkness and the radiant sky light, between harmony and terror.
How to perpetuate the calmness of surfing the waves in safe equilibrium or otherwise, suddenly, that greedy eagerness of emerging as if being born and breathing for the first time?
We may intend to propose here only a metaphor of life as a whole, something abstract, mediating in a sublime way our access to an aesthetic idea that crushes us as much as it expands us beyond the bearable. Finally it may be a carnal experience, immediate, where a real sea becomes home, universe, city and cosmos. The perpetual variation between the chaos and the outline of a fragile territory.
It may be the possible image of brief seconds of immersion that reveal to us millennia of expansion of life among the forces that crush it while elevating it, and thus learning how to turn fortuity into means for its own purposes. Furthermore it may be the realization of one that lets himself into the rhythm of the matter and gets involved in the running of a time where an instant takes hours to register, where eternity is traced in a movement.
When concretized, these images emerge as the mature affirmation of a total mastery achieved in the aesthetic composition. This is not in any way confounded with the technical expertise that cannot be ignored. Yes, it is a profound knowledge of the materials, but less about their physical properties, perennial in their materialization, and much more in how they can incorporate vivid sensations, timeless in their configuration. A memory that does not fit in any individual body, does not fit in any personal soul.
A pure flowing-fluid where it is no longer possible to recognize frontiers between the work and the author, or between will and chance. Between the necessary permanence of the forces and the always fugacious froth of the days.
Rui Mascarenhas, Miramar 2015
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