Landscape painting is, among many other things, the cultural effect of a conflict between the historic need for modernization and the melancholy of a separation, produced by a neurological flow of the boulevards and bureaucracy; a conflict where hunting, sport, thermal baths, picnics, strolls along the countryside, camping, the naturalization of the weekend, constituted the most mundane, most physical dimension. The subject, bourgeois and owner (fleeting from desacralization processes, from the separation between ego and totality, invented by the political and economic revolution of his class), would rediscover his animality through those new habits, but needed an Arcadian redemption, an aesthetic compensation, and landscape paintings seemed to fulfill that task by assuming themselves as the pictorial dissonance between the picturesque and the sublime, between comfort (and the selfish delight) and tragedy (the sensation of natural form as the loss of scale, the irrelevance of human destiny). The pride in his work, in his achievements, the terror of their ending, and the indifferent silence of the whole seem to feed the relationship between the good bourgeois and the landscape. There is nothing of his own there, his identity is dissolved, obscured, his positional strength is lost, and still, the bourgeois is moved, enchanted. He morbidly reproduces the optical, holistic sensation of that loss. He wants to replace the risks, the danger, the unpredictability of «estar lá» [being there], on the cliff near a stormy sea, on an Alpine glacier, on a mazelike canyon, on the unhealthy summer of Tuscan countryside, with the protection of the pictorial screen. This danger is frozen in a fiction: the landscape.

(…) Pedro Vaz resists in showing the finiteness of what is represented, of the outlines that fixate it, that stabilize it, the photographs get left behind along the path, the waterfall is intentionally blurred, and the liquid substance becomes a pulse of light and color where the shape loses its thickness.

Pedro Vaz’s landscape paintings are also a product of contradiction as were the ones from Constable and Turner, cultural products of growing capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Living in a post-Fordist era, one’s routine, the routine of the drives, of the stays, is made in a territory occupied by «monumentos ao presente não-histórico» [monuments to the non-historical present]: quarries transformed into contaminated lakes, industrialization splendors transformed into dead labor graveyards, unfinished streets of uninhabited neighborhoods, fields filled with ruins; everything seems to assure that there is no longer an inch of land where the natural world is not just a wasteland waiting to be built upon. However, Pedro Vaz’s position is opposing this monopoly and apparent fatalism of social and technocratic readymades and completely contradicts the economic nihilism that configures anyone as «robot-produtores consumidores» [producing consuming robots]. This is the ideological focus of the works here presented.

(…) It could be said that João Queioz’s work is an attempt to densify one’s relationship with the landscape, or rather, with a gaze that moves and is already a thought. However, not without considering the nuances, which such an observation requires. Otherwise, one could say that João Queiroz seems to claim some kind of distance concerning the modern perceptual traps that fuel up from an objective, reifying, and fundamentally disenchanted conception, since it is literal and of the world.

Returning to Eastern painting, João Queiroz requires one to pay attention to the impossibility of mapping partitions between writing and painting in this relationship with the world. The artist could ask «Isn’t drawing and painting also writing?». It seems indisputable that calligraphy masters also drew or painted (here the terms are interchangeable) what they observed when writing, i.e. what was moving in nature, even if unnoticeably. Luís Quintais would venture to argue that it is not, however, about living up to outlines or shapes, but rather about reproducing the rhythms and oscillations of the world in the artist’s gestures.

This project, which is presented to the public in Miranda do Corvo, is a result of three CAPC exhibitions with artists Pedro Vaz and João Queiroz. The exhibitions are: Stimmung (2014) by Pedro Vaz, with text by Pedro Pousada; Ahnungslos (2014) by João Queiroz, with text by Luís Quintais; and, the collective exhibition project by Linhas Cruzadas.

To structure this text, Pedro Pousada, Luís Quintais, and Carlos Antunes freely selected extracts from the corresponding exhibition's texts.

Pedro Pousada, Luís Quintais and Carlos Antunes
Coimbra, November 2014