Drawing in the limit - Drawings by Flávio de Carvalho (1899-1973)
Marcelo Guimarães Lima
Imprint - Journal of the Print Council of Australia, volume 49, number 3, 2014.
Flávio de Carvalho – drawing from the series My mother dying, 1947
In 1947 Brazilian artist Flávio de Carvalho (1899-1973) stood by his sick mother's bedside and recorded in a series of drawings the final agony of an aged woman dying of cancer. The series, with the descriptive title: “Minha mãe morrendo” - My mother dying (later also known as “Série Trágica”- Tragic Series), was exhibited in 1948.
This series of portraits, for they are indeed unique portraits, a compounded death mask, were done with an economy of means and a clarity of touch that translated the motions of extreme human suffering into clear and urgent graphic forms. They presented the pathos of death with urgency and yet with relative sobriety: from a close point of view and, at the same time, with the kind of detachment proper to the type of vision, the seeing which is, in fact, that of the artist in the process of observing and recording the inherently unstable, movable forms of reality.
For, indeed, a kind of displaced identification with the figures of reality is for the artist what brings close to the mind (and to the mind-hand connection, the thinking as making that characterizes drawing) the realities of things and processes or their true configurations. Displaced, that is, in the object of vision, as another object, in the act of seeing, as another vision, in the time of vision itself as another time. A time prolonged or suspended in and by the powers and the constraints and limitations of aesthetic form.
All funerary related art wants to preserve the “likeness” of the deceased person against death itself: in the graphic (drawn, painted, incised, sculpted) representation of different times and places, what once was is made present again here, now and for the future, as representation appeals to memory countering the destructive powers of time. In Flávio de Carvalho's series, the focus is on the event itself: the final event in which the subject is disclosed in all its frailty, in the last universal event of life. The subject, that is, ourselves, in the very particularity and universality of our condition as creatures of flesh (universally sons or daughters), attached by the flesh and the spirit to others and living through, thereby, each other's fortunes and misfortunes, in all of life's joys and miseries.
The portrait, any portrait, is always already a “death mask”, the record of what was and is no longer, gone with time. All funerary art is a Memento Mori, the remembrance of the departed that serves also to remind the living of their own mortal condition. An artistic or art-historical “ancestry” to Flávio de Carvalho's series can perhaps be located in Late Medieval funerary sculpture: the transit tombs. The transit tomb portrayed the king, or the nobleman or high Church dignitary, in the process of physical transformation by death, symbolically with a cadaverous counter- part figure or partially transformed into a cadaver (1). The modern artwork is, of course, informed by a somewhat different experience and concept of human time and of human transience, and a different perspective on the ideological dimension, the functions or “uses” of art, conscious or otherwise.
When first exhibited in São Paulo the “Série Trágica” drawings were met with public shock and disorientation (2). It contributed to establish the artist's reputation as a kind of “artiste maudit” of Brazilian Modernismo.
Flávio de Carvalho was one of the most important and innovative artist in Modern Art in Brazil, and yet, for a long time a relatively marginal figure in the narrative of the history of Brazilian art (3). He was a de facto pioneer, in the first part of the 20th century, of artistic initiatives that only in the second half of century would be recognized as belonging to the varieties of “conceptual art” and “performance art” (for instance: Experiência n. 2, from 1931, and Experiência n. 3, in 1956)
Flávio de Carvalho was a kind of polymath, an engineer by education and early professional practice, turned architect and artist: painter, sculptor, graphic artist (drawing, printmaking). We can observe that the unity of his diversified artworks is given by the underlying forms and concepts of drawing. The immediacy and spontaneity of drawing as a result and effect of the artist's mastery of his mental and physical means, and as a result of the exploratory, form-searching nature of the act of drawing (which includes hesitations, new departures, the accumulation of layers of marks and ideas, incompleteness, etc.), are qualities present in Flávio de Carvalho's diverse creations: in the characteristic gestural element and informed graphic energy, in the clarity of line and in the searched vitality of forms, in the experimental spirit, that is, in the conscious immanence of the work to its time and place, or the mortality of art itself, whether in architectural, painted, draw or sculpted works.
The concept of the artwork as experiment, as an open form (dynamic, movable, necessarily incomplete, etc.) as exploration, and related concepts, is a central idea in Modern Art. Experimentation and exploration have been central concepts in the practice of drawing in the history of Western Art since the Renaissance, or, in its more conscious forms, at least since the Baroque age. It is perhaps not completely wrong to say that, in a sense, it was from the “laboratory” of drawing practice that emerged some of the forms, attitudes, directions and ideas of the movements of Modern Art. Taking “drawing” here to encompass not only the traditionally defined group of materials and techniques but also all the possible hybrid cases, superimpositions, borderline cases, the mingling and mixing between drawing, painting and other graphic arts, etc. “Drawing”, that is, the affirmed and disclosed identity of process and product. We need just to have in mind the great number of sketches, preparatory drawings, watercolors, preparatory or complementary paintings and painted sketches, etc., by Picasso in the process of creating the Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), the inaugural work of the history of modern painting and in itself a large sketch, an “incomplete”, open-ended work. In its most basic element or ground, drawing is the experience of the becoming of form in time, or of form itself as a mode of time.
notes:
(1) Erwin Panofsky (1992) Tomb sculpture: four lectures on its changing aspects from ancient Egypt to Bernini, New York: H.N. Abrams
(2) Stigger, Veronica (2009) Retratos dentro da morte- a Série Trágica de Flávio de Carvalho, Crítica Cultural, vol 4, n. 2, dezembro.
link: http://www.portaldeperiodicos.unisul.br/index.php/Critica_Cultural/article/view/131
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