manuel caeiro

MANUEL CAEIRO

MANUEL CAEIRO

Manuel Caeiro graduated in Painting by the Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade do Porto. As far his exhibitions in a group, we have to mention her work in the exhibitions Downtown (Lurixs, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2009), Paredes Vacías (Galeria António Barnola, Barcelona, Spain, 2008) and Welcome to my loft (Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, Portugal, 2007). From his group exhibitions we have to mention Surrounding Matta Clark (Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, Portugal, 2006), À Volta do Papel (Centro de Arte Manuel de Brito, Algés, Portugal) nd his attendance at ARCO, ARTELISBOA and ARTESANTANDER. He is represented in many public collection such as Banque Privée Edmond de Rothschild Europe, Lisboa, CGD - Culturgest and Fundação PLMJ.Manuel Caeiro´s work is based on a constructive principle, giving emphasis to the cromathics, the texture, interrelating drawing, architecture and painting. He focuses in compositive order coming through the classical roles of perspective, and disorders it, dismantling it. This kind of intervention is also seen in the way he uses tonal and material changes, 2 and 3 dimensions, that show us more than the classical balance and symmetry. Between the years 1999 and 2000 he centres his work in a research process about the weathering of tiles and walls of the typical Lisbon taverns. From 2001 he has leaning over around the house concept, through Cenas Domésticas (Gallery Ara, 2001), Neighbourhood (Gallery Évora Arte, 2002) and the group of exhibitions Dream Houses (gallery Ara, 2003), Inbox (Gallery Paços do Concelho de Torres Vedras, 2004), Outside Door (Palácio da gallery, Tavira, 2004) conceiving spaces as geometricaly progressive structures, based on drawing as a structural principle of volumetry.

Manuel Caeiro nasceu em Évora em 1975. Vive e trabalha em Lisboa.Das suas exposições individuais destacam-se as que foram realizadas no Palácio Vila Flor, Guimarães, Portugal, no Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa, Lisboa, Portugal (33’ de fama, 2011), na galeria Lurixs, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (DownTown, 2009), na galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, Portugal (Welcome to my Loft, 2007) e no Museu Nacional de História Natural, Sala do Veado, Lisboa, Portugal (Casas da Caparica, 2005). Em relação às suas exposições colectivas poderemos referir as que tiveram lugar na Fundación Barrié de La Maza, A Coruña, Espanha (La Colección, 2011), no Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (Terceira metade, 2011), MACUF - Museo de Arte Contemporânea, Coruña, Espanha com curadoria de Paulo Reis (Fiat Lux - Iluminación y Creación, 2010), no Centro de Arte Manuel de Brito (À Volta do Papel, 2008) e na galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea (Surrounding Matta-Clark, 2006). Está representado nas colecções da Culturgest, Lisboa, Banco Sabadell, Barcelona, Fundação PLMJ, Lisboa e Colecção Manuel de Brito, Oeiras, entre outras.Para Manuel Caeiro o espaço é uma entidade descontínua; entendimento que motiva uma análise dos campos de transfiguração e tensão entre os corpos e o vazio, através das deslocações e derivações do vocabulário formal da arquitectura - o volume, o traço, a escala, a coerência, o padrão, o ritmo, a superfície e que provoca uma obsessiva ordenação e indagação sobre o visível.

Manuel Caeiro, Domestic Viability, 2010acrílico s/ tela acrylic on canvas, 90 x 100 cm

Manuel Caeiro, Dream House series, , 2003, carvão, ecoline e pastel de óleo s/ papel, 180 x 136 cm

Manuel Caeiro,apartamento T0, 2008, acrylic on linen, 200 x 125 cm

Manuel Caeiro, Estudo para casa descartável, 2008acrylic on canvas, 100 x 140 cm

Manuel Caeiro, Untitled, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 90 cm

Manuel Caeiro, Untitled, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 150 cm

Manuel Caeiro, A Repartição, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 100 cm

Manuel Caeiro, Library, 207, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 980 cm (detalhe detail)

Manuel Caeiro, Welcome to my loft, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 115 x 145 cm(colecção Fundação PLMJ, Lisboa, Portugal)

Manuel Caeiro, Divina Precariedade, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 95 x 95 cm

Manuel Caeiro, Lollypops #1, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 190 x 145 cm

Manuel Caeiro, 12000 m2 dentro de um T0 #2, 2011Acrílico s/ linho Acrylic on canvas, 180 x 335 cm

Manuel Caeiro, 12000 m2 dentro de um T0 Pintura B, 2011Acrílico e fita s/ c-print Acrylic and tape on c-print, 150 x 118 cm

MANUEL CAEIRO’S LOST FORMS David Barro

Like many contemporary painters, Manuel Caeiroquestions painting starting from the repetition of forms.Each line insists on the achieving of an idea, and itsmultiplication, its sequence, generates the definitiverhythm. Manuel Caeiro works the modular detail asthat which unleashes each new image, and he alwaysdoes it starting from memory or recall of what isconstructed, seeking a new order. Thus his strategy isthat of unfolding or propagating a reality that isreconstructed and therefore fictitious, which is born out of the most traditional of mediums – painting – to the one that possesses the most historical charge andwhich at the same time to all appearances processes aweaker contemporary condition or at least one that ismore questioned, with its mental state being acontinuous reason for debate.Barry Schwabesky stated: “From its Modernist andConceptual past, contemporary painting retains thebelief that each artist’s work should take a stance, thata painting is not only a painting but also therepresentation of an idea about painting”. Thereforeour first question ought to be: What is the idea thatdrives Manuel Caeiro to carry on painting? The easything to do would be to ask him, but I consider it to bemore opportune to digress on his possible intentionsthan to uncover the direct secret of his trompe l’oeil.First of all one should further qualify the question ofwhat we call painting. Because very often the onlything that is left of it and its origins is the term. Todaypainting is more than ever an attitude. As Thierry deDuve pointed out, painting is no longer a technique,but a tradition. An idea or a manner of thinking,certainly about painting itself in its possibility ofapprehending the world. Having overcome thedomination of “self-referentiality”, of the “essence”, andafter the continuous sounding-out of painting as acategory, of the feeling that for years we have beenwitnessing different continuations in relation to aninherited medium. Since a few years ago there havebeen no tendencies, nor solid groups outsidestrategies that time will weaken. We are simplywitnessing the dejà vu of a series of deaths andresurrections. Because, apparently, everything can be

painting. Being particularly tired of the tradition of the new, I am assuming painting as a phenomenon of the gaze that might be extended as an installation, which is often impenetrable and always simulated, the videoprojection, which may be read as our personal painting of history, or anything else that the artist defines as painting.

In Manuel Caeiro’s case it is obvious that the imagecomes before the painting. The image is always bornout of another image or from reality itself – eventhough this might be the product of the artist’simagination. This is then distorted in an almost blindact by someone who dominates the craft of painting. It is as if everything had exploded. I am thinking of the series Exploding Cell by Peter Halley, in which theidealist vocabulary of abstraction explodes in theprocess of transfiguration of geometric purity into acell, but also into a sort of drawing with acomputerised, colouristic and truly Pop Art outline.Throughout the sequence of nine images, and likecartoon-comic drawings, there is a description to theexplosion of that square with a chimney and piping, an ambiguous, perhaps apocalyptical landscape, at the same time minimalist and Pop, with connections that might go from Lichtenstein himself to the American realism of Edward Hopper1.Figuration or abstraction? Might it matter? Possibly inManuel Caeiro the above-quoted explosion is more

of a dissemination of the movement and the hesitations of the viewer’s gaze, like in David Redd, who confessed his intention to provoke an effect of movement through the panoramic format, a format also used by Caeiro. In this manner Redd points out that when looking at an isolated part of his stretched horizontal paintings, the other parts, which we see out of the corners of our eyes, seem to be moving, because peripheral vision is particularly sensitive to movement... This effect is thus reinforced through the painting; some areas are blurred, like being out of 1 Barro, D / Negro, A.: Sky Shout. La pintura después de la pintura, Auditorio de Galicia, focus in photography, and other areas are clearly represented. Isn’t this the same as Caeiro’s shortened architectures? This confrontation between the blurredand the sharp, between the close and the far off, ispresent in the work of a large number of artists who are opposed to all contemplation and at the same time activate the said surface with space itself and the architecture of the place, forcing one to consider the whole image. In the end, the painting stands more as amirror image of memory, as a virtuality of what has been lived. But above all as a prison for the painter, as Lacan indicated in La

schize de l’oeil et du regard: “In the back of my eye the painting is being painted. The painting is definitely in my eye. But I, I am in the painting”.

Buster Keaton’s WindowAllow me this metaphor and the presentation of thescene: a couple is setting up a prefabricated house inorder to celebrate their wedding. Beforehand, a formerboyfriend changes the numbering of the pieces inorder to provoke a disaster. During the wedding astorms shakes the house and the guests are hurledout through doors and windows. A façade falls on topof the protagonist, but he is precisely at a point thatcoincides with the opening for a window. The film isOne Week (1920) and the protagonist is, of course,Buster Keaton, the eternal stone face who had acontract with a clause forbidding him to laugh in public. The same scene is taken up again by Keaton inSteamboat Bill Jr. eight years later; and also by SteveMcQueen, extraordinarily, in Deadpan, in 1997, with itbeing the artist himself who remains motionless in thevery centre of the event. That trapped, almost absentor at least disorientated spectator is the subjectobserver of the painting of Manuel Caeiro, who deals with making the space of the painting physical, albeit introspectively – the painting – or prospectively

Manuel Caeiro, Há vida no 1º andar, 2007Técnica mista s/ papel Mixed media on paper, 150 x 130 cm

Manuel Caeiro, Há vida no 1º andar, 2007Acrílico s/ papel Acrylic on paper, 150 x 130 cm

– the staging of the theatre of the painting. So he titles his latest exhibition Welcome to my Loft, as if inviting us to go through the mirror into a world in which everything is a painting. And without us moving. The scene becomes a prison of the panoptic kind, like thatpointed out by Bentham, like an exhibition that lookstowards us in order to introduce us into the other time;the time of the painting.It is therefore a painting that shelters us, that enclosesus within another time. As Michael Hardt states inrelation to time in prison: “time stretches and collapsesin a sort of optical illusion. Each day is full of activitiesand appointments that are compulsory and specified in great detail. Time moves at a snail’s pace; the day isendless. You look at that fly on the wall and itsmovements seem infinitely slow. Mealtime neverseems to come round, yet when you recall those daysat a distance they seem to be indistinguishable. Theyfold into each other like the bellows of an accordion.The time spent seem to have no duration, the preciserepetition of its components, homogeneity and lack ofnovelty take away its substance. Prison time lackschance; it is predestined time. Nothing isunpredictable. Everything is planned out beforehandby a higher power. The several different hands of thepenitentiary authorities seem to grant precision to theall powerful hand of fate that moves the prisonerthrough the programmed course of the sentence. Theprisoners try in vain to cling to this volatile andephemeral time, giving it some substance orpreciseness, albeit only symbolically; in crossing outthe days on a calendar, making lines on a wall, theymark out time”2. Caeiro and his painting try toasphyxiate us in this unfolding that we can also extendto the formalisation of his painting, that is multidisciplinary in its relationship with sculpture, or above all with architecture. A painting with no way out, but at the same time standing as a way of escape, of an exit to other worlds, like Keaton’s window.Because in Manuel Caeiro’s painting everything isvirtuality and potential, given that it results in comingfrom a situation of emptiness. Manuel Caeiro(re)invents spaces that do not exist, even though,however, they were already there, or at least theycould exist; I insist on potency, on their vitality. Soalthough we recognise these empty spaces as apossibility we will never be able to do so in a definitivemanner, either because Caeiro inverts the order of

things (the sky, the stairs...) or because he is able tochill the forms in order to bring them closer to moreanalytical conceptions, as in his latest works.Thus, as spectators we are forced to use intuition, tospeculate, given that in this reconstruction of thatwhich is invented by the artist himself only theemptiness of Keaton’s window allows us to go ondreaming, or, which in this case would be the same,remain standing. Clinging to this possibility will meanbecoming aware of our dream in order not to sink, likethe sleepwalker who must carry on dreaming in ordernot to hurl himself to the ground, as Nietzsche wouldstate.The metaphorical exercise would be easy: to frame theemptiness. I am speaking about how simple it is to setlimits on the sky; like when James Turrell opened theceiling of a gallery, that open window where housesexpand without permission, taking advantage of theslope of their rooftops; or when Anish Kappor playswith the illusion of the reverse of a trompe l’oeil innegating the depth of the emptiness in a block of stonestarting from the monochrome and impenetrablepigment. Two ways of stating and denying the optical,the space and the very experience of looking. We seethis in another Portuguese artist, José Pedro Croft,given that the meaning of his mirrors is not that of acorrect returning of the image, but rather that ofshrinking, stretching, contracting, developing andtrapping it, even to the point of completely negating itor expanding it into an infinite space. Therefore weconclude that we are moving in an undefined space,with lines and signs that bring us close to a method ofdetermination, but which end up drowning in apreliminary absence.But when we talk about framing the emptiness I wouldlike to stress that we do not do this in the sense offraming the landscape. That would imply a picturesqueattitude, and this is not the case. The picturesqueresults in coitus interruptus, in something provisional.In Manuel Caeiro there is above all a stating ofcontinuity, although this comes from emphasisingcertain discontinuities. It all results in a sort ofdisturbing of the fictionalised real. It is a perversereciprocity that is connected to that non-definition ofthe limit in artists like Richard Serra. Although Serradoes not work from an image and Caeiro does. It islike that Utopian architecture by Boullé or everythingthat has no scale. I am referring more to Caeiro’s

paintings than to his sculpture works, which followother rules. In his sculptures the whole problem issolved a priori, and in many cases they might functionas increased scale models. In this way his sculpturesare opposed to Serra’s works, committed tocontradicting architecture. And there it is clear thatManuel Caeiro drinks above all from architecture,especially in his sculptures.The difference is in that which we call parallax, fromthe Greek parallaxis, meaning ‘change’. In otherwords, the slopes in Serra’s sculptures seem to shift,to take on other shapes when the spectator moves.That place of vacillation takes place in the painting of a Manuel Caeiro who, although he does not intend anexpanding painting that forces the exterior/interiorjourney of the work, implying a physical shifting, doescall up a mental shifting as the basis for apprehendingthat other space of experience, painting; always withthe spectator remaining still, like Keaton, and it is histense gaze that seeks out solutions, like in Berger’stales. After all, the experience that Manuel Caeiro presents us with is the same – although with the precarious aspect of a medium that is as rudimentary as that mixture of pigments that we call painting – as

that we encounter when we look at a movie screen. Let us think of two artists who have a perverse relationship with minimalism: Dan Flavin and Sugimoto. The former uses fluorescent tubes as a ready-made object. If in conventional minimalism the material is changed from one context to another, in Flavin’s case the neon strips perform their usual function, giving off light. This does not happen with Andre’s works, for example, and much less with other minimalist artists like Judd. Flavin takes an element with a sculptural form that will end up functioning as an indeterminate painting. The relationship with architecture is undoubtable given that the tube radiates a light that transforms the wall into a sort of blank screen that affects the objects that are located close to the work in question. Some of Caeiro’s latest paintings will inherit this solution. Meanwhile, Sugimoto serves to support the change of perception felt by the spectator after looking at Flavin’s work.Sugimoto, in his photographs of open-air theatres and cinemas, does not allow one to see the films projected from a photography exhibition that lasts as long as the film itself lasts and the result


of which is that the screen becomes dark and does not allow one to perceive its content due to the excess of images. The formal minimalist simplicity is undoubtable, as is also his intention to represent the passing of time in a photogram, freezing fleeting moments into a whole.We go from the default minimalism of Judd toexcessive minimalism in the case of Sugimoto.Nowadays no one seems to doubt Flavin’s minimalism, but at the time it was not to the liking of other minimalist and conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt, who stated that he liked everything in Dan Flavin’s work except the lights3. Naturally, what annoyed LeWitt was how artificial light implied an idea of imitation of nature, something which pure minimalists avoided at all costs. In this manner LeWitt will reduce the material aspectsin order to claim the structural ones; the layout and not the form. For that reason he will eliminate the parts of the cubes in order to be left with the skeleton,depriving of perception by default, unlike Flavin with a light or emptiness that paradoxically fills everything,like the fog in a painting by Friedrich.In Manuel Caeiro it is the repetition that forms that sort of palimpsest. Because the repetition gives rise to the difference, the imperfection that Manuel Caeiro has never tried to erase from his painting4. What is virtually the same is potentially different. Because when we try to stretch time, to strangle depth in an orgy in the shape of a labyrinth, the time of vision is also different.And Manuel Caeiro expands this time in order toconcentrate it. He does so using a resource that is asold as painting itself: trick/recognition and its reverse.The absence of figures annuls the narrative principlesand reveals that emptiness which allows thespectator’s projection. The sum of the elementsconstitutes a possible, but for the spectator the gameis lost beforehand. The house comes down on uswithout touching us. We stand up facing the painting.

From Borges’s Universe to Manuel Caeiro’s LostFormsManuel Caeiro’s painting stands as a space oftransition into another space or form. As if behind thatKeatonian window another were to appear, andanother, in a kind of game of Russian Matrioshka dolls.The spectator would thus be a kind of imperfectlibrarian, as Borges stated about the man in his shortstory The Library of Babel. At the beginning of the taleBorges writes: “The universe (that others call Library)is made up of an indefinite, and perhaps infinite,number of hexagonal galleries, with vast ventilationshafts in the middle surrounded by very low railings.From any of the hexagons one can see the lower andupper floors: interminably”5. Doesn’t the same thingtake place in Caeiro’s labyrinths and/or pools?In Borges’s story the thinker observes that “all thebooks, no matter how different they may be, are madeup of the same elements: the space, the full stop, thecomma, the 26 letters of the alphabet. He also allegeda fact that all the travellers have confirmed: in thewhole of the vast Library there are no two identicalbooks. From these indisputable premises he deducedthat the Library is total and that its shelves hold all thepossible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographic symbols (a number which, although extremely vast, is not infinite), that is, everything that it is possible to express: in all languages”6. These possible combinations fit in with that sort of destruction and (re)-construction that Manuel Caeiro allows himself to present. And I would go further: Manuel Caeiro does not mind leaving the mark, the print of that act.Everything results in a set of clues that will never allowone to achieve a definitive form. It is all intuition andclues for the debate, steps to get to the other side, orsimply to the other, to the remains, to what is no longer there.Borges points this out in a footnote: “I repeat: it isenough for a book to be possible for it to exist. Onlythe impossible is ruled out. For example, no book isalso a staircase, although undoubtedly there are books

that discuss and deny and demonstrate that possibilityand others whose structure corresponds to that of astaircase”7. Staircase or not, Borges leaves the dooropen to the possible, like Caeiro and his recreation ofspaces that do not exist but may exist. This is why heleaves us inside his particular library, painting. “If aneternal traveller crosses it in any direction, he will findafter all eternity that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder (which, when repeated, would be an order: the Order)”8.Caeiro’s painting allows a making visible. It leaves thatdoor or window open through a cocktail oftransparencies, opacities and impossible perspectives.The colour, or more specifically its continuousstrangulation, its confrontations, gives itself to thisconstruction of the possibility, as takes placethroughout the whole of the history of that painting that has dealt with inner three-dimensionality, the imagined one, that which is born out of memory and expands that virtual nature.At this time it is clear that Manuel Caeiro moves fromstructures and divisions in the painting, acting from apost-minimalism that is very connected to thearchitectural; from a period in which he worked starting with a corrosive, exhausting language in which time had an explicit importance; towards the repetition of modular elements capable of rhythmically structuring the compositional and bringing it close to the threedimensional.In any case, it should be pointed out thatwe are talking about a space in which everything ismixed and contaminated in favour of a perceptive logic dominated by light and colour. As Luísa Soares de Oliveira has stressed, “all of Caeiro’s work seems toplay within this duality: on the one hand, commitmentto geometrical rigour, which in the discipline of drawing is given by the set of rules and precepts that codify the technique of projecting planes, lines and volumes, with a view to constructing buildings and monuments; on

the other, the stain, the informal, the chance naturethat systematically invades the rigorous structure ofthe lines, as it would never do in architectural drawing,for example, or that of engineering”9. We are talking,therefore, about painting as a form of apprehending aworld that seems more fictional than ever, but whichtransmits the same vertigo as Caeiro’s pools.We could export all this to an apparently “real” contextand we would remain in that mass explosion of thecolour of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation or in themulti-coloured façades of the official protection blocksin the city of Tirana, which have recently been paintedas part of the programme promoted by the city’smayor, Edi Rama. The video Dammi i colori, by AnriSala, gives us a stroll through the streets of theAlbanian capital, while the voice-over by the mayorhimself – in the past he was an artist – contextualiseshis project in relation to the images. Some were takenat night, with a spectral beauty that seems to evokethe metaphorical shadows of the scaffolds thatpainters use: their reticular form evokes the structuresof modernist utopian abstraction, and, by extension,their becoming and consequences, successes andfailures10. That sort of reconciliation between light andshade, between the precise and the uncertain,between the physical and the mental, responds to thatfluid sense of the space in Caeiro’s works.We are talking of uncertainty, of virtuality, ofcontingencies, but surely we should do so about lostform or interruptions of what exists in order to definethat apprehension of the visibility that Caeiro appliesthrough his pictorial “marks”. Once again the unfoldingor unfurling, the positivised negative, allows theinvisible or the dreamed to take on form. It would belike an engraving, or like that gesture by Veronica andher handkerchief in Calvary, that revelation. There,precisely, is the production of that transition to thearchitectural, that struggle against the invisible limitthat is produced in Rachel Whiteread’s withdrawninteriors, in Bethan Huws’ duplications, in RenéDaniëls’ “no places” or in Pedro Calapez’s distorted

scenography. But Caeiro’s work is a fleeingarchitecture, one that is deconstructive or, insisting onDerrida, without remains. Because in his works heshows the shiftings and the corporalities/ geometrieshaving become a footprint. That invisibility is what issecreted; it is the product of the remains that remain,that are left over, that resist.The relationship with architecture is thus speculativeand hybrid, as if Merce Cunningham’s spacelessdance could float through it. The emptiness is thespace that is left over, the absence of memory, thenon-presence. Like in Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture andhis mutilated houses, the figure – although it is inmemory – results in a spatial complexity, in spatial cutlike some of Carl Andre’s most complex installations.The Impossible ProjectDeep down, Manuel Caeiro’s work is a continuousinterference, a dissemination, a dysfunction ofmeaning, a protagonising irruption of the fragment. Itslost, speculative and/or virtual forms convert his loftinto an impossible project, into a non-architecture as anecessary evolution that never stops beingconstructed, that is never concluded and is always afragment.I believe that for Manuel Caeiro, as for so many artistsinvolved in an impossible project, in the true project,there is no obsession without memory. So all of hiswork – I insist – is based on an insistence, on arepetition of motifs that make it a place for overlappingencounters or discourses which, in the final analysis,function as countersigns that emerge in a constantmanner. Let us not forget that a synonym of obsessionis disquiet, an inclination towards something, directedserenity. Nor that life writes about us and leavesmarks, its particular memento, and in Caeiroeverything runs a universe on the tattooed skin of thepainting, as we have said, one overloaded with historyand information, of critiques and revisions that end upinvolving a living organism, like a open book that youhave to explore and penetrate its different levels.Manuel Caeiro is no different to many artists who try toconstruct their discourses in the Derridian manner,

like cloths of footprints capable of flowing over the linearity of the writing, or, in this case, of the architecture. Each work-text-architecture refers to another, inter-crossing, blending and subverting hierarchies. Thus the context is valorised; as well as the marginal. That is why there is some sense in his flirting with photography in that sort of demolished architecture represented by some post-boxes that warn us of the path we will follow in a loft-exhibition where everything is painting. Everything obeys a split logic, one of those that do not reject whatis contaminated but welcome it in order to lminatean expansive interest. The key will lie in decodingthese passwords of personal identity, those signs ofbelonging. Then we will understand why he feelsidentity as a question of strategies, and not so muchas essence, and why his house – which is our house – is no more than a (perhaps abstract) dream that in the final analysis results in a memory of the lived, a story that has gone:We are speaking about the house as experiencedtime, as being in tune. Therefore I think that my text is expanding and at the same time being continuously folded, dominated by an image that functions as an insistent, repeated sequence, one that allows our slipping from the past to the present and from the present to the past. Thus this book brings together ideas and images that have accompanied Caeiro as visual anthropology. But that also in his last exhibition lets the reference to the house be concentrated on a set of motifs that he deconstructs with a certain irony (I am thinking about the basketball that floats somewhat lost among so much painting without painting accumulated one after the other: the work to be done). Caeiro thus challenges the “pure” notion of identity, of origin, in order to claim the footprint and its erasing, the narcissistic reflection and its disappearance; in short, the virtuality of identity. For that reason, in his paintings he makes the impurities visible and follows astrategy that we might classify as rhetorical, of

destruction of the same. Caeiro works with the real,but he melts it down and makes it surrealist in order tochallenge our perceptive capacity, establishing thefissure. Thus some of his figures remain incomplete,often baroque in their formal bluntness, often intimatein that sort of nostalgic mystery that works asdeconstruction and that Derrida himself manages toturn into an archive illness or overlapping of thememory that in its cryptic nature ends up negating thediscourse.Deep down, as we have been announcing, all of hispainting is like an immense self-portrait; for this reasonall the angles are valid, because Caeiro’s truth isdistilled once we have been able to definitively deformthe landscape with the painting. So everything seemspossible in his painting, given that it stands as anattitude, as a proposal that has to be derived by aspectator who has no choice but to inhabit thepainting. Because Caeiro translates the painting into ageography that is born out of the perversion of thescale, proposing a shifting towards the scenographic.And the latter leaps out of the painting to shoutwelcome to my loft, and once divorced from thepainting, once assumed as an idea, is configured as aperfect interference, as an excess or cold-tonedwhirlpool that becomes poetry. And always withpainting as a house and as a subject, as a place forthe alienation of the one who travels through that placeof tradition. For a good reason it is said that wheneverone speaks of painting one inevitably brings up thejourney, in the case of painting almost always withouta destination.Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out in Human, All TooHuman: “everything that is usual weaves a web that istighter and tighter around us; then we realise that thestrands have become traps and that we are sitting inthe middle, like a spider trapped in it which must feedoff its own blood”. And that is what Caeiro’s painting islike when is presents itself in a grouped manner, whenit is capable of weaving a network of painting thatinvolves us beyond its virtual two-dimensional quality.

Due to all this it seems to be so disordered. I amthinking of the intimidation of a blank page and of my empty office, with neither papers nor books,immaculate; total order only exists in one type of sterile house, without the footprints of those who inhabit it, of those who paint it or write it. I wonder whether we can live without disorder, and how the XIV and XV century bourgeoisie did when they combined their home with their work, or in the past when houses were filled with people losing their intimacy as rooms did not have differentiated functions; people did everything in the same space, thus the apparently improvised disorderof the furniture against the walls that we see inpaintings of the interiors from that time.But I also think that the recently deceased JacquesDerrida, who defines architecture as “an inhabitedconstruction, an inheritance that concerns us beforewe have tried to reflect on it”; also in its deconstructive legacy that is inherited by architects like Frank O. Gehry, whose own house stands and a perfect example of being apparently provisional, of improvised transgression that seems to go against all the architecture manuals. We could say the same about architects like Bernard Tschumi or the CoopHimmelblau team. And then I come to a possible rash conclusion: if there is such a similarity between these structures and those made as shelters for thehomeless, that is, for those who do not have a houseand use waste products as their raw materials,especially cardboard to protect them against theweather, then surely Manuel Caeiro and his paintingmay increasingly move in the direction of an attackagainst the stable, tending towards a certaindestabilising of the power of architecture and ofpainting, to then be distilled in a radical making thatbreaks down all order, like in the obsessive activity ofGregor Schneider, who dedicated over half of his lifemodifying the dimensions and interior distribution of hishouse in Rheydt, a German city on the lower Rhine.This makes up his main work, which he calls “ur”,

which in his language describes something original. Itis, therefore, his Haus ur, the original house, the aim ofall transforming, that place in continuous restoration.Schneider oppresses our thoughts and breath inconstructing new atmospheres over already existingspaces: walls over walls, doors, windows, cubbyholes...All of this is not very far removed from ManuelCaeiro’s mature, and radically experimental, painting.If for Umberto Eco that which is closed hides itsfissures even though it keeps them, leaving what isfinished, concluded, open to new actions, to nowfunction as openings or new closings, for Caeiro thatclosing is converted into an accumulation, a tattooedmemory, an exercise in perpetuity of his own identityand that of painting. Therefore, if we are playing atchoosing moments, we will note how history is notmade up from a continuity of facts, but of the retention of a series of representative images that we store in our memory. And it is precisely that character as a visual archive that supports one of this artist’s main motives for artistic struggle.Each of Manuel Caeiro’s works functions as acondensed memory that includes as many questionsas answers, individual experiences and culturalreconstructions. And it does so from a particularbaroque stance in which pure theory and the intimate condition cohabit, in an eagerness that is more recapitulating than recompiling, reflexive more than conclusive. Caeiro collects a set of objects in order to make up his context, but they are recognisable, familiar objects, although in many cases they seem neutralised or deformed as if immersed in a dream due to a confrontation of the dimensions of the colour that favours that perverted and stratified reality between the house and the landscape, between excess and the intimate scale, between the space and the place, or, in short, between the time of the painting and architecture as memory, nothing beyond that sort of pictorial reversibility that has always characterized Caeiro’s painting. Because Caeiro’s mystery always comes from the quoted condition of deconstruction.

Let us think about his first exhibited photograph thatwe encounter in his latest exhibition. Its similarity toCaeiro’s architectural ordering is undoubtable, butabove all with all to the modular repetition that smallwooden houses in Costa da Caparica possess. AnaSantos Guerreiro correctly points out the nonexploitation of the interiors of these houses, and draws our attention to the idea of container architecture. “The small wooden houses and the extent of the space that gives them meaning as shelters, the motif dear to the delirium of the backgrounds, produce pretexts for compositions with a strong chromatic saturation, implying the sense of the light and the force with which there is the revealing of visibility towards the idea of ahouse. (...) In the geometric form of the huts thereinhabits an ordering habit of construction, an inertia of craftwork that is joined to the paradigm of the house”11.Possibly Caeiro’s crypticism or painted mystery makesus conclude as we would do in Joyce: it is surely notcertain that it has a story, and if it does it is equally notcertain that it is all there. Thus they allow andempower bifurcations, leaps and connections, andpoetic licence. Because certainty supposes the deathof expectation or, in other words, death supposes thesanctioning of everything that the narrator might relate, if we think of Benjamin. Like Borges, Caeiro cultivates his own garden of the paths that bifurcate, although they take the shape of a pool, or, above all, of a shortened staircase, like in Afternoon, by MichaelJoyce, where the readers are faced with 539 narrativesegments and above all need time, decision, andavailability in order to understand references and todevelop possibilities. Like in this last exhibition,Caeiro’s is a painting that is expanded as well as beingdeconstructive, a painting with large doses of irony and an objectual charge. Like a re-reading, Caeiro acts by playing with scales, with textures, with distances. That is why he insists on the motifs, because Caeiro does not invent the space, nor try to re-invent it. I would say that his intention is a sort of reading

between the lines,of territory for experience, of spatial compositioncapable of providing a meaning for an identity. Ibelieve that in many of his works we move in anundefined space, not in the sense of an absence ofdetermining signs, but assuming its unlimitedcondition, its polyphonic fragmentary nature. Thus Ithink, in Robert Musil’s words as expressed in his vastwork The Man without Qualities: “Hundreds of sounds follow on from one another, being confused in a prolonged metallic noise from which several different sounds stand out, some clear sharp sounds, other harsh ones, which bring discord to the harmony but reestablish it as they disappear. Due to this noise anyone could have deduced, after long years of absence, without any previous description and with their eyes closed, that they were in the capital of the empire, in the residential city of Vienna. Cities are known, like people, by the way they move. Looking from far off and without focussing on details, one could also have revealed the movement of the streets”. I imagine that Manuel Caeiro’s strategy in his works does not consist of avoiding these sound tensions but the opposite, given that he demands a sort of rhythmic narrative, although mute, of syncopated notes, rises and trills of all kinds. On the other hand it is evident that the sort of sound ubiquitousness that I am talking about acts as a metaphor to describe the austerepoetry with apparently cold structures that Caeiroleaves us with in his latest works. I am referring to thesound as surroundings, as displacement in the waydemanded by Musil. This is why I consider this to be a view of architecture as anatomy, as a living organism, demanding the personal experience of a spectator who has to thus stand back from perpetual contemplation; for this reason he crosses elements, pleats and fissures until he makes the succinct extensive. Therefore I would conclude that our artist acts from the sidelines, trying out the mysteries from the imbalances, drawing up exercises on the

difficulty of thinking timeas a memory, painting as a footprint and architectureas a resonance. Bernardo Bertolucci must havethought something like this when he planned his wellknownerotic Parisian tango played by Marlon Brandoand María Schneider. I am referring to the almosthuman personality that the empty apartment on theRue Vavin takes on as a landmark for the protagonists’furtive meetings. These fleeting encounters suited theemotional force of a place that charges an unusualpresence from the most energetic silence. Three livesin ruins say it all without words, as if resigned to animplacable destiny that is simply evoked with theflowing of time. “It is better to live in the provisionalthan in the definitive”, Bachelard would state.I am thinking of Citizen Kane’s obsessive “Rosebud”,but also of Berger, for whom it would be opportune forthe memory to be more recent than childhood. Deepdown everything becomes an experience that has tohave a psychological story starting in childhood andbeing completed over time. Thus everything becomestense waiting. In short, what this deals with is toreconstruct – to paint, photograph or sculpt – a seriesof memories from objects charged with life, like theleather flesh of a basket ball, but from a past life,recited from the nostalgia of an absence that refers usback to another time, that of painting. And always,from the silence of the private, from the secret of avirtual diary of emotions that is born in daily life andresults in exercise.It would be something like giving light – knowing thatlight constitutes a paradigmatic concern for Caeiro – ormore concretely being able to apprehend it as anatmosphere or unspeakable desire for truth. Barthespoints out: “The air (I am calling it this for want of abetter term, the expression of the truth) is like theinflexible supplement of identity, that which is given tous freely, stripped of ‘all’ importance: the air expressesthe subject inasmuch as one doesn’t attach anyimportance to it”12. For this reason these latest

1 Barro, D / Negro, A.: Sky Shout. La pinturadespués de la pintura, Auditorio de Galicia,20053 Ross Skoggard: “Flavin. According to hislights”, Artforum, 19774 The stains and drippings mark out the idea ofauthorship, of painting. In this sense they act asa footprint of the human – the artist – in theabstract world of geometry and absence. Theseapparent ‘imperfections’ are the subversive sideof a painting that wishes to signify itself assuch.5 Ver Borges.6 Ibidem7 Ibidem.8 Ibidem.9 Soares de Oliveira, L.: “Desenho de Projecto”,Galeria Ara, Lisbon, 200310 Idem Barro / Negro.11 See reference to Ana Santos12 Roland Barthes, La cámara lúcida, Ed.Paidós, Barcelona, 199013 “They were all square. I meant that thegeometry was something that existed in the realsurroundings. That idea of the idealistic squarecould be seen as a paradigmatic, diagrammaticarchitectural entity. In putting bars in the squareI meant that geometry was a prison. Structureand geometry were penitentiaries, not ideals likein Malévich or Mondrian”. Peter Halley talkingto Kathryn Hixon, Peter Halley, MNCARS,Madrid, 1992

opposites by Caeiro are more subtle opposites, likebrusque and fragile or thick and the most absoluteopacity. But these confrontations have always existedin Caeiro’s work, just like the geometric rigour of hisdrawn lines often drowned in the impurity capable ofcontaminating the virtually sterilised in order to grant itlife. It is, in short, the Machiavellian game of makingthe impossible possible; the opposition in the shape ofa shadow, a stain, an ephemeral gesture capable ofwarning that the artist is there. The dual aspect, thetransitory, the almost cinematographic projection, thenon-permanent, the temporary, the limit, once againthe shadow... A whole kaleidoscope of forms andattitudes that give order to the world. Like Caeiro’strajectory that evolves more through sensitive blowsthan through strength, through covers that make up aninvisible history of the process. Speculative like Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture, seeking the collapse of thestructures, and critical like Peter Halley’s13 railedstructures, Caeiro affects and explores the spatialpossibilities, the context of his work. To do this hegoes from the above-mentioned accumulation, like inBorges’s library, like in the painter’s studio, like (diz“con” no espanhol; devia ser “como”) in thecompartments that lead the three-dimensional natureto its ultimate consequences in his latest soloexhibition in the Carlos Carvalho Gallery in Lisbon in apart dedicated to a gymnasium, a worked metaphor ofeffort, which is also that of painting. Because in Caeiroeverything is a development, an unfolding in a simplemanner that becomes complex in its life in symbiosis,in its repetition.Thus I believe I am repeating myself when I comeacross artists who work with the Manuel Caeiro’sintensity in order to achieve the Nietschean need torelive everything eternally: “I would really enjoy beingable to repeat all the time, repeating everything: thatwhich is a statement”, proclaims Derrida. I supposethat those of us who write do so in order to keep it. Butthat exercise in archiving should never be stopped, butrather completed with the same infinite memories that

move Caeiro, a continuous repetition of desire as aregeneration, of ruin as experience, as an openmemory; because for one who writes, we could say almost the same thing about all good artists, because independently of the formal derivations that each one has they all maintain a tense gaze that allows us to be able to sense their lost forms; in short, to enter their respective lofts.


Manuel Caeiro, Arrufos e Entulhos, 2014Acrílico s/ tela Acrylic on canvas, 110 x 160 cm

Manuel Caeiro, Para um projecto #5, 2013Acrílico s/ tela Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 70 cm

Manuel Caeiro, Backstage of light, 2013Acrílico s/ tela Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 70 cm

Manuel Caeiro, Meia noite #1 (da série “Backstage of light”, 2013Acrílico s/ linho Acrylic on linen, 200 x 215 cm

Manuel Caeiro, Paus sem cor #1, 2014Acrílico sobre tela Acrylic on canvas, 171 x 126 cm

Views from the exhibition Belém Coffrage (Março a Maio 2010), Ermida de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal

Views from the exhibition Fiat Lux curated by comissariado por Paulo Reis (Abril a Julho 2010), MACUF, A Coruña, Espanha Spain

Views from the exhibition Manuel Caeiro (Janeiro a Abril de 2010), Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Guimarães, Portugal

Views from the exhibition Amazing White Emptiness (Julho a Setembro de 2012), Museu de História Natural - Antigo Picadeiro do Colégio dos Nobres, Lisboa Lisbon, Portugal

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