With the hands that he could for carlos nogueira

by Paulo Pires Do Vale

“a man was searching for himself”(1)

What leads to the artistic gesture?
The search for the self, the artist tells us.
What can that gesture do?
The temporary construction of the self, he states.
All human work should be aimed in this direction – being creative. Creator. Man gives his form to the world through his work: he mirrors, reflects himself – he thinks, feels. He discovers himself on the outside; in exteriority he recognizes a form of his own. On the outside he finds himself, not as an exile – in the negative sense of being outside of himself – but in the positive sense that there, on that outside, a door opens to the recognition of the self – expanding. In the process of starting again. Always in the process of becoming an other. Which does not mean a step towards the past, to an identity yet to be recognized, pre-existing and hidden, but to a possible self, one yet to be created. Realising itself. As an event. Sculpting itself: for the artist, poetics (the theory of artistic practice) is always a poetics of the self, which can, through the work, serve others in their own construction. The work creates the artist in being created by him, and then it dispenses with him. In this way, as an autonomous entity, it might subsequently prove useful to whoever wishes to receive it.
A permanent construction. The man who seeks himself is a house that is always being built, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed... Assembly, disassembly, reassembly... As the wisdom of Ecclesiastes teaches us, there is a time for everything: a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them.

“a man was searching for himself
when he noticed that the cornfields had been set on fire
the sea was unruly
and the sun was burning differently”

Disaster is always a beginning. The reconfiguration of the world. Dis-aster: the falling of the stars, chaos in the heavens, corresponding to a parallel disorder in the lives of individuals. Disaster is the unexpected change in reality (whether or not it is real). The loss of habitual reference points. A shock. A shipwreck. The effacing of the known horizon and the security of order. Deregulation: the ending of law. The discovery that there are other ways in which the sun can burn. Within the disaster, however, there are men who feel the urge to resist. To rebuild. The urge to revolt – a movement which is born out of love. Like the inhabitants of the Alps who so astonished Hegel because, after seeing their cabin destroyed by yet another avalanche, they would build another in the same place. Time and time again. The struggle against greater powers. Or rather, the struggle against (their own) impotence. Always starting again. Between nothing and everything.
The disaster is the beginning. It allows a point of view that is unknown but closer to the roots, the fertile soil, the levelling of foundations, the obscurity of origins. A shock that the work of art can provoke. In other words, it is the work of art itself that sets the world alight. It threatens, destroys and recreates a new horizon. It is disaster, Blanchot wrote.

Gathering stones and remains: a possible definition of the artistic gesture. From these remains, rejected by others, the artist constructs the work – the light of the past, ruins, buried bones, the forgotten wall crossing the field, the echo of the poets’ words, present affections – because “what remains” is seed. Provided that we do not think of the past as untouchable, or history as sacred, or the artistic gesture as pure recomposition of something already done (there lies the land of the dead). And the thing that allows it to remain alive, and allows stones and remains to be gathered, is that history does not oppress and tie the hands of those who wish to recreate the possibilities of the world. Ashes are fertile ground.
With the hands that he can, which can at all times, hands that are always different, he always builds differently on that terrain of disaster. Within a context or situation, adopting it or opposing it: the artistic gesture is untimely, out of synch. Beyond the time in which it is inscribed. It comes from a long way off and goes very far away. Anachronous, it always questions time. The historical context does not determine it: its power – and the criterion of its validity – is that of the ever-possible recontextualization. With no temporal interdictions.
Remains: what the builders rejected, he welcomes. He places them under the light. The useless, the abandoned, is now the centre. In the case of this exhibition, we find a dual centre.
Firstly and immediately, it offers us a structure that is useful for a construction but which, having fulfilled its purpose, becomes unnecessary: the artist’s gesture creates a diversion by recovering the obsolete. By bringing it inside the exhibition space, in that shift, he constructs a work from what the builders rejected: the formwork becomes the work itself. And he applies another diversion to it: he lays it down, as if it had fallen over. Reprised in a different discourse and diverted from its previous function and verticality, an unexpected addition of meaning is produced. He re-arranges the world. He de-localizes: changes its place and, more than that, changes the place.
Secondly, and in a more deviant way, he suggests that our experience should accept the centrality of the apparently useless: the void. He reminds us that the house is built around an absence. It is this absence that is useful, despite being devalued. The void is creative, sheltering space. As Lao Tse wrote:

“Clay is fashioned into vessels but it is on their empty hollowness,
That their use depends.

The door and windows are cut out to make an apartment.
But it is on the empty space within,
That its use depends.

Therefore,
What has existence serves for profitable adaptation,
And what has not that for usefulness”.

What is true of the house is true of work and of man. They are also constructed around a void. A sphere in which the centre is the void and the circumference is in a permanent but finite state of flux. Inviolable and untamable space. Plastic space. It is the existing void that allows the plasticity – that of the work and of man (dying is losing the empty centre). To furnish the void – to illusorily fill it, to make the malleable and plastic fixed and rigid – is to lose the house. To lose the work. To lose oneself.
How to keep the void and build around it? Without expelling or masking the void but adopting it. Making it visible.
The man who seeks himself will find the void – which is him. He will put stones and remains in place with the hands that he has, giving it the coming, nascent form around the void. Mediating it. Exhibiting it. One void inside, another outside.

“a man was searching for himself
when he noticed that the cornfields had been set on fire
the sea was unruly
and the sun was burning differently
with the hands that he could he devoted himself to gathering stones
and what remained
to build a geometric house with an opening to the sky
in the opposite direction to the landscape and houses
that he had known thus far”

Gathering stones and remains to build a house with an opening to the sky. And will it still be a house if it opens to the sky and is closed to the horizontal? Useless sign of scandal. Deviant. Reformulation of the laws of pragmatics, of physics, of architecture. Reconfiguration of space – the artist’s work is permanent experimentation in and on space, spatial design, the appearance of a non-existent before.
A geometric house – a work characteristic of human reason, deviation from nature, subversion. Cosa mentale. But in building by rejecting the cliché and the habitual formula, he strays even further from the deviation that geometry already is. And he gives it a material and corporal dimension: something spatial. A passage from the Pascalian spirit of geometry (the blind and mental world) to the spirit of refinement: it is necessary to know how to look at what is in front of us with the body. The site of the clash is that empty open space, an experience sensible of thought and doubt.
The house described in the text, open to the sky, is subject to multiple deviations: by inclining it, he closes it to the sky and opens it up to the horizon; he lays it down, makes it fall; makes it transparent, exposed; he brings about a suspension in the process of building it, revealing the moment before the end; what used to be a medium, an intermediate device, becomes an end in itself. The transparency is not only that of the material, the acrylic, but that of revealing what we usually do not wish to be seen. The im-perfect. What was prior to the final state. The draft that is considered and assumed to be a work.

“a man was searching for himself
when he noticed that the cornfields had been set on fire
the sea was unruly
and the sun was burning differently
with the hands that he could he devoted himself to gathering stones
and what remained
to building a geometric house with an opening to the sky
in the opposite direction to the landscape and houses
that he had known thus far

with the light that there still was
he made it the ground”

A remainder – a ray – of light is now ground. And the ground of the house is distinct from the ground of the street. Even when the light is the same (which it never is). The walls of the house separate inside and outside. Intimacy and the street, from the poem by Ruy Belo. But one does not exist without the other. What separates, unites.
In bringing together the “reclined house” and two drawings on wood that he recovered from his childhood (other remains), he brings the exteriority (?) of the street to the exhibition in a more obvious way: an ancient concern, the arrangement of public space which is always the opposite of the house. Unfolding. To construct private space (the house) is to construct the public space (the street).
The house, as a work, allows this dual construction: of an intimacy, different in each one, through a personal relationship with the work; of a community, which the work also demands (and forms). The work is the creator of the community and not just of subjectiveness – and few works reveal this as well as this serious joke that the artist proposed in 1978: O pombal. 99 pombas de brincar para outros tantos usadores. [The Dovecote: 99 Toy Doves for as Many Users]. The construction of an aesthetic and political community, of its unruly rules, in the common sharing of a unique playful experience. The search for the self always with others.Intimacy is not only found inside the house but also on the street: on it, we pass others but we mainly pass ourselves, as the poet reminded us.

Inside and outside, through building, the one that seeks himself can find himself by never finding himself: making himself. In a fragile way. Holding a handful of sand in the desert and throwing it a few metres ahead of us: this is our way of changing the world. A positive affirmation of poverty and fragility – and one day, in his studio, the artist quoted Tagore to me: “There is nothing better than the perfect win; but if this is impossible to achieve, the next best thing is the perfect loss”. Today I would remind him of a phrase by the poet Edmond Jabés from a book that I found in his library: “The richness of God is that of being poor in such a way that no poverty compares to His”.
The perfect win and the perfect loss ultimately coincide.

But they are humanly inaccessible. However, without the deprivation of (albeit imperfect) loss there could not be an attitude of expectation, of attention that creates the world (richness): directed towards what is coming. In the (dis)equilibrium between welcoming the rejected and learning to reject. Because we are impure, in us there are no perfect wins or losses. We neither touch the whole nor embrace nothingness. We are the medium, on the funambulist’s tightrope. A house and street under construction.

(1) Carlos Nogueira, construção para lugar nenhum [construction for nowhere], 2001/03 – page from the plan, author’s collection.

Translation by Sean Linney