Leon Kossovitch
In Cabral, there are two sets of work: the what. As painting, drawing or engraving, he exposes the result of the artistic process and that, attached to him but without being displayed, is as the rest of the production. This set is associated to that as a tool, but at least glance, as if it is not despised or exempt, being, as the remainder, linked to the development of the work. Nor slag, or waste, the rest is the flowering of the elements involved in the artistic process as vestiges of it, with no calculation, or prediction, he will be writing in correspondence with what happens in the open in the works of canvas or paper. Accordingly, a less abrupt writing surface extends itself, offered in the eyes of the museum that opened to the process difference, the set of readable traces casually clumped, which Cabral calls “object.”
Being in the paintings presented here, it demonstrates the contemplation of museums, museum-logy and other objects in another clearly intent: beyond the sublimation of the instrument, object, museum, this is intended, not the eyes fixed on the works, but driven by instinct, as ink instrument, support, body, lost for the work, produce cumulatively without prior sorting, which the witness re-sublims the object, while he stipulates how to look. Witnessing the process of which, incidentally, is part directly involved at a time wasted and maintained by the object, as exemplified by the assemblage of a knife, thick paint, lacerations, impact, fouling of fabrics, bristles, papers, finally, unrecognizable as a tool, it attests, the choice of jumps, repetition, and discontinuous flowering of desire. He gives, therefore, an eloquent testimony in intervals, brightly, because it is a result of the process, a raising and archaeological museum, although primary, which reads as a desired museum of art, without it, however, it is a postulated hierarchy between them. The objet museum belongs to anthologies, opening up the flowers on display in 1991, in which Cabral sets off the beauty to perfection at Paulo Vasconcellos gallery, with the blackness that he paints the exit to the desert, there also with grays that drip, overlying the glowing colors and elegant designs with which he became friendly with. In this passage, detached from action and passion, there is the agglutinative process, elucidated the object and, by extension, in the work, both by alienating the grid regulator that captivates, capture, capturing the scopic drive, which was also the desire, it capitulates.
Two scriptures of desire, the two groups involved in order to make them interconnected, because if one reads the other, one is expressed in the other, inter-expression or correspondence: the assemblage contains the concept as it considers the elasticity of the elements involved. Support, ink, instrument, body type, everything, in short, participates in Cabral’s painting, thus sorting out petrifying hierarchies. The body relieves itself of activism, as the instrument does, and to be freed of passive correlate, the ink and the support: exempting the apostles of the autocracy of the subject, it gives action and passion, anything is lightness in the vibration of the neutral. Brush, broom, spatula, trowel, knife, crushing, moving, stretching, expressing, thickening, breaking, desinstrumentalizing in an assemblage that is not sticky because it does not allow foreign subjection which produces active and passive in relations to body, paint, support, even model, which, not least neutral, also ignores such opposition. Untied the knot, very narcissistic subjectivity, the neutral light flickers very lightly: so it is not prescribed to the artist here in readiness for running away from doctrine, it is a logical consequence of well designed agglutination, bright flash as in some lithographs and drawings, interval as in most of the paintings, not excluding them, with a process resumed and abandoned, because the trace of light do not shine successes. In assemblage, the body is also light, weightless in time, as foreign to the epic of a very active subjectivity: not so full of himself on the subject, nor as negative, faint, it is filled with emptiness, the assemblage is a movement of discontinuous elements.
The shells, with which in 1983 Cabral starts a singular path as a painter, exemplify, spatializing, agglutination as a process, fleeing of insulation and concretions, it sights on the clearance form imprisoned by something. Tensive surfaces, the shells have the lightness of structural self-supporting, since they are not restricted to the boundaries that things tend to be imposed: not taking long on those ones, the vision relates to the gesture that accelerates as the body does, and the brush with thin paint relieves its concert. Overcoming things, but not to rebut them, the shells open while a painting firms that subsequently, when the thick paint and the resources with which it extends prevail in participating in the actual painting, in relation to moving, breaking or crushing and their modalities. Very active, this painting is removed in the 90s, when the assemblage settles, settling some of the features then searched as assimilated repertoire, so unthinkable, that the present exhibition shows. How thoughtless, the repertoire is promptly updated in bringing it together, keeping them where and when other possibilities are not explored. This is also why nothing is postulated as outside the assemblage, either as a foundational principle or authorized, either at the other end, as a work separate from the process.
The work is not loose from the assemblage, and as such, it is inhabited without the artist knowing how and when this happens: painting, drawing and engraving are works of art, which, in different ways and times, suddenly erupt, led by the lightness and agility of an indefeasible neutrality. What emerges is not a gesture of Mao and is out of sight: Aquiropita is the name of what constitutes the work as work, overcoming the housing function thematic, iconographic or other. The work is becoming one that involves the painter’s nap, and where the desire is realized, in a imperceptible move of intermittently risks during the movement of the eye. There being no appeal to the subjectifying mirage, the work is installed as integral and as a tension, which, escaping the stasis, dead spots where the paint stagnates, operates as a self-supporting shell, rewarding live exploded tensions. Producing tensions in the molar support and molecular intensities, one disdains the game of active and passive: the establishment of the scheme, in a vibrant and potential time, the work is installed, Aquiropita, as inseparable from clumping while in its conclusion.
From the two pictorial directions shown here, there is one which is returning to the aforementioned exhibition of 1991, whose sequence is materialized in 1995, in which the assemblage brings supervenience as the first Cabral’s work, the one of the early ‘70s mood. This way, inseparable from the panels shown here, coexists with pictures and figures presented here, coexisting with pictures and figures also appearing here as the other pictorial direction. Such coexistence is only apparently paradoxical, since only a glimpse into portrait and figure, implies a model and observation, and they are incompatible with figuring that flows without recourse to anything other than pictorial material. This correlation should consider another difficulty stemming from the sense of watching paint of the early Cabral’s portraits, who, appearing in the second half of the 70s, when he studied Sao Paulo’s 40s painting, and adopts the gender distinction that it maintains as set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth Impressionist and post-Impressionist models. Although observation is never abandoned by Cabral, the pictorial device mounted by gender, no matter how much one insists on it, is shifted in the last two years, making the transition from painting to painting portraits and pictures to panel painting.
Thus recent, portraits and pictures in this exhibition differ from previous ones, in which, initially modeled and stained, then the shells, producing a picture that produced sentimental appeals, in keeping with the poetic to the aggrandizement’s narrowness provided as extreme poetic genre. It is certain that the shells, shifting paint from the thing, ran from the modeled and the stain, but are not introduced as poetic, so it is still refused as a “literary expression.” The gestural repertoire, however, maintains a monumentality, that, being supra-objectal in the painting of the shells, it differs from the modeling or tarnished models by making itself as a combinatorial gesture and from the matter, for several different aspects and properties. This combinatorial remains largely in painting portraits and figures in this exhibition, because it is an extensible repertoire to new pictorial elements, expressive of poetic elements, which are also new. The inter-expression here implies, without being able to declare, in her, a first, the emergence of a poetic figure in correspondence with the introduction of what Cabral called, not without irony, “chiaroscuro” and “detail”. The figure tends, in these works, to a white shade that, far from producing a modeled style, it applies also to the body in dialogue with darker lines or otherwise un-petrifying the colorful picture without details occurring. It is the mix that emphasizes some of the major areas, many times difficult to identify: Cabral does not validate a similarity of species, as he ironic puts it, “pantograph,” which supposes that the model is exactly applicable to the support, because recognition does not arise from any physical similarity-metric given, but the trace of passion in character, temper that by linking picture and pictured, belongs to neither, there is adequacy of physiognomic similarity to the mark, the postulate of decorum and verisimilitude of pictorial poetic, Cabral consults the genre, most often as a comical disproportion that makes you laugh without pain.
Portrait and portrayed are being inter-expressed with the movement between the support of the painter and the model in his amatory comedian sight. With to the mark that connects them, binds them to the vision and Inter-expressive visionarization that in such and such inflection point, it changes direction. Excused the design outlining, it is from the matter that they draw the portrait and figure, which, appearing and disappearing, play hide and seek with that: the figure, succeeding its aspects, includes or removes material, instrument, gesture and conversely, the episodes change the picture. From start to finish of the painting session, Cabral is operated by a double separative and vision, led by the matter, guided by the figure, which may accrue a third to them, which is no vision, but visionarization: the sudden, the visionarity binds to the outbreak of the not formulated figure, which goes like the visual picture, matter. Therefore, not only in the repertoire of gestures plus the generators of detail and the chiaroscuro of the game and two visualities and visionarity that the matter is established: the figures are emerging and submerging, which is also observed in a group of portraits in the game of short and broad strokes of brushes, which are taken from 1983, but they are thick and variegated. Homogeneous, they bear no visual picture, which leads to the outbreak of another vision, when the eclipse of the resonant field, settling conflicts and replacement of materials in the figure. The eclipses exhibit the sharing that occurs in the paint, giving it power, this set of pictures, exacerbated.
The visual and visionary’s game, as well as the matter and figure’s one, constitutes the poetics of recent Cabral’s agglutinations: panels which clarify the exhibition of ink and visionary figure, not figuring them visually to anything. When the figure grows, the subject disappears, succeeding each other, the visionary figures themselves: there is not only conflict, but complementarities, to highlight the inextricable connection between matter and figure. In all paintings displayed, contemplation and desire alternate in reciprocal exclusionism and simultaneous cooperation: breaking the figure of desire when the view is interrupted, while the visual is implementation and continuity. Visionary figures are of poor fixation, demonstrating the intermittent movement of desire, while the visuals tend to attachable adhesion, as to produce an unforgettable memory when they are a proper memory, monument. In these paintings and engravings, Cabral clarifies the relations of desire and vision of matter and visionarization, of figures generated from complementary and mutually excluding poles. It is not the unconscious that is painted in Cabral, but in his painting he can break out, and in it, he does not surrender to instinct, but remains, though productive, uncatchable.