[Manuel Valente Alves, “Cadmo e Harmonia”, 2007]
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE DRAWING by Emília Ferreira
1.
In the beginning was the drawing. A vestige, a mark that soon went
from being random to being intentional. As if we only saw or only recognised
the world because we had already encountered it before, thought of it before,
organised it in the intimate quarters of our thoughts. As someone has already
said, we see what we are prepared to see. This is also what happened in this
process narrated to us by the exhibition of Manuel Valente Alves. Pointing to
the primacy and the reflection that it presupposes, the drawings conceived for
this exhibition begin the process of this plastic route with a proposal for a
formal organisation. That is: the first drawings serve as a foreword.
Preparation for the journey, they foresee what the artist would later find.
The photographic record is the second phase. In it we find the
landscapes that the drawing had prepared. It is as if Manuel Valente Alves
had arrived at this place – in this case, Berlin, a city symbolic of Europa, a
metaphor of the primordial kidnappings and wounds, metaphor of the
reuniting and the reconstruction – and had recognised in the outlines of its
buildings, its structures, surfaces, textures, that which he had organised
beforehand in Lisbon.
Does one think of a city to then raise it up or find it again? The first
drawings of this series are, certainly, a metaphor for the construction of the
city in accordance with the geometry of the heavens. An organisation that is
mental, divine – if we wish to wrap ourselves in the mythological mantle – an
idea of that which the world can be. And then what do we do when we travel
and we want to remember what we saw? Dantes also drew. The drawing was
a record, memory. Today, we take advantage of the more immediate
possibilities of this other writing, made with light. And in this case, the exercise
augments and confirms the initial image, the project.
Do we take photographs of what we have already seen? Of what we
were wanting to find? In these images, the city is confirmed as created in
accordance with the geometry of the heavens; it clearly repeats the
organised, symmetrical plan, whether in the columns of stone or concrete, in
the stairways, in the windows, in the surfaces of the buildings or the pavement
of the streets, in the transports that pass and leave their luminous trail, or in
the ordered geometry of death, evidenced in the pattern formed by the
austere blocks of the Jewish cemetery.
An important note at this point: no photographed element is
immediately recognisable. Each image is a fragment. An urban splinter, a
reminiscent stroke. As the momentaneous instant remains on the
photographic record, isolated from the vaster time line, the detail here is seen
as an episode. A moment. A point. In the same way do not know the place
where these stairs lead to, neither do we immediately perceive that the
squared stones of cement, ordered and clean, represent a cemetery. This
information, marginal to the formal narrative, underscores the irrelevance of
the tourist poster, the traveller’s guide, the favour of the primacy of the
drawing. It does not matter exactly what it is, but the way we see it and allow it
to be seen.
Because in truth, the narrative, no matter how it fits in, must always be
parcelled out. The stories begin with a disturbance open in the stream of life,
and they continue on while the problem remains unsolved. Understandably,
they end as soon as a solution is found. For this reason, as essayist Louise
Poissant noted, happy people have no story. The plot, a word that in itself
contains the seed of a labyrinth, is precisely the intrigue of the enigma. And
this is the axis of all the stories. The fragment operates as a condensation of
the mystery. In itself, it may or may not contain disturbance. We don’t know.
But we want to believe we do. And this is the haze that leads us to the abyss.
2.
From the heavens to the earth, from pure geometry to its material
expression, the photographs record various motifs. An immediate mode
without intermediaries to capture what is visible, the skin of the world, these
images are not limited however to record what the light frames in the forms,
but above all, that part of the drawing that persists in the existing. This intense
order of the real – occasionally broken up by the pictorial spot of a golden
surface (or of a metallic yellow that simulates it, an imitation of the symbolic
metal), through the opaque contrast of red and black or by the mouth of
Helios flashing across the sky – remains intact, in its complementary order
(vertical and horizontal lines cross the photographs) as if the gods or a greater
desire of rationality maintained a clear command of this outline.
3.
Europe is born in Greek mythology. The same is saying that, as a
civilisation, this is the starting point, the navel, the primordial egg. It is from
there that we all have come. From the shoulders of these giants, we see
much further. The Middle Ages affirmed this, debtor to a previous
philosophical culture. So we remain today. The stories we tell invariably have
the flavour of these old gods. The fairies and witches that peopled the
centuries since then, inhabiting places that never existed but which remain
until today, places whose exact location we know, in the intimate geography
of the stories, have a strict relationship with these inhabitants of Olympus and
their wiles, their weaknesses, their powers, their failures. Human, too human,
these gods envied us, coveted our finite lives, the splendour that forced them
into the unforgettable. Commanding chariots drawn by lions and javalis, tying
up heroes with hair that is transformed into chains, changing their appearance
to seduce or punish, they cohabit with us. They are part of us, of our genetic
code. We were left with the taste for telling, the taste for pulling strings, for
revisiting labyrinths.
Even if we can no longer read the heavens, as the essayist Roberto
Calasso noted, in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, even if we no
longer hear the rumble of the stars, the shreds of sense that we still find there
become a part of the thread of tradition.
4.
In the midst of order, the human presence (the only natural element,
besides the occasional presence of green in a single image) moves like the
erratic component, vaguely Dionysian (although with a controlled, rational,
Apollonian appearance) in all the vast mathematical scenario. In the midst of
order, pure jubilation can then flow. The intoxication of life. A group of youths
advances with happy abandon along an asphalt path. It is a metaphor for the
memory of the primordial Spring rising over the construction. Here there are
no clumps of daffodils to distract the attention of the girls and lead them to
perdition.
Between the columns that support the heaven and the architecture of
our millenary constructions, these lines remind us of more than the need for
the support for constructions: rather it is the urgent layout for the alignment of
the world. The chaos is escaped by reorganising the visible. In all these
images, it is the geometric temptation that arises, the structural relationship
that permits understanding, dialogue. Outside of nature, where we have
known for a long time that man does not owe his best and most healthy
condition, it is in the Kantian dominion of law, order, knowledge – or drawing –
that civilisation remains. It is in this domain, in this writing, that Europa breaks
with the slobber of Zeus, frees herself from her kidnapper and his rude desire,
reappearing from the froth of this violence and arising to affirm her speech,
her identity.
5.
And so we come to the last drawings. Affirming themselves as the
synthesis of what has been seen, the drawing becomes residual. It recovers
the essential lines of the world, restructuring it and simplifying it. The works on
display in this exhibition precisely show this path. First and last, mimicking the
circular patter of the cobra, a metaphor for the eternal, the drawing:
geometric, as befits the rational organisation of the project, the projection of
the heavens, in accordance with its intrinsic order, they appear spaced out in
the slow observation of the movements of lines in space. Triangles, squares,
rectangles, in perspective on a flat, white surface, purified and expectant, are
aligned in succession as one who prepares his eyes to encounter again this
organisation in the real world. Then, that which remains on the retina: the
guidelines for all that has been seen. For this reason, these last drawings
already contain another story. The refer us to the place of memory. Once
again, not a remembering of patrimony, identifying monuments and places,
but a pure visual memory.
Leaving the destroyed city of Thebes for exile, would not Cadmus take
with him the memory of the layout of the streets of his city? Of its buildings?
This intimate urban writing must have helped in the birth of the alphabet. To
codify the real in the sands of a beach, in front of a wine-coloured sea (to use
the Homeric expression), must have been the first step so that the sounds
would also have a record. Then, alpha, beta, gamma… the letter gave the
name to the system: alphabet. And although in Portugal today we say it
farther from Greece and anchored in our own letters, a, b, c, d, “abecedário”,
the root is the same. It was this root, this power, that Cadmus brought to the
West.
Meanwhile, Europa was confused with the sea. Cadmus, the brother
that had gone in search of her and who ended up by finding and marrying
Harmonia, founding with her the city of Thebes, whose ruins he would have to
abandon, would bring us this fabulous fortune. With it we weave our story. We
are still descendants of Cadmus and Harmonia. We are heirs of Europa, the
young maid that transformed Greece into a continent. Even if we no longer
know the geometry of the heavens.
According to the geometry of the heavens
1.
Marguerite Yourcenar wrote one day that nature advances across the
ruins of civilisation. Those were not her exact words, but the idea tranquillised
her because she knew that an abandoned house would soon be invaded by
weeds, soon the walls would give in to the force of roots, soon the constructed
would give way to the primordial.
I know a house in Lagos, the city where Sophia dipped her hand in the
shadow, in which a fig tree grows. It does not grow from the ground, as is
common in trees, which arise from it in an attempt to reach the sky, but from a
wall that faces the street. Below, people pass and few are those who stop at
the perfume of its leaves, or even that of its ripe fruit at the end of the
summer. Are they afraid that the building might fall or are they overconfident
in the strength of the construction? In any case, they don’t see the fig tree. It
has been growing in the wall for several years. Every year I salute it.
2.
The last time I walked along that street in Lagos, the fig tree had been
torn from the wall of the building, which was being worked on. I don’t know
where that leaves me: if in the memory of the perfume, if in the maintenance
of the building’s outlines. I do know that no matter how much one recomposes
a face, it will never return to its infancy. Sophia no longer walks along these
streets. Greece is a long way from here.
3.
The sign of the works is graphic and shows constructions and a hand in
a reflection of the image. Not the hand that drew it, nor the one that
photographed the sign, but a hand that is also another sign. I am immediately
reminded of another hand, marked like a stencil in a grotto thousands of years
ago. It was an open hand. This one is closed. This is the hand that grips the
instrument. The other had to be open, because it was the instrument itself.
4.
These stairs do not go anywhere. They are smooth and new, in a play
of line that conjugate with the fine line of the stones of the wall and with the
denser composition of the gate. Where do these stairs lead to? They are the
pure act of going up and coming down, ascending and descending, a
pendular movement. Indefinitely, infinitely. The stairways of Escher played
similar games. It is the triumph of design over the limitations of reality.
5.
Windows are merely the eyes of the buildings in the compositions of
children. Adults do not normally have this capacity of seeing. They lose it
when they gain other things. Money or good sense, or both; or neither of
them. They lose it like they lose access to magic thought, like they lose the
capacity of hearing the disturbing noise of the night skies. But perhaps the
exercise of drawing – which operates also like the windows, in the same
game of one who hides to reveal, and who reveals to hide – is the magic door
to return to the encounter with the eyes of the buildings, the points of
observation and affection that will allow us to open our arms to the landscape,
to the other.
6.
Neither do we any longer see the landscape in the rain as Turner did.
We have become used to travelling by train, or even airplane. We see
everything at a higher speed, even when we are stopped. We perceive the
forms because we already know them. And we know that the yellow spot that
passes swiftly by is the train. The mechanical eye of the machine regains here
the lost role of innocence.
7.
The figures fit in the small square of the image like one more fragment.
Organised in an almost neo-plasticist manner. Almost as a quotation of
Mondrian, with their rational surfaces where only the pure colours and the old
non-colours assert themselves.
Only the presence of humans alters the rhythm of the image, bringing
with it a tenuous element of disquiet.
Part of a part, they keep the mystery intact. Nothing of the images is
explicit, nothing unequivocally tells a story. Nothing of what we see is only
what we see.
8.
K. is headed towards a hidden space. Unrevealed. There are no signs
of the foam of Aphrodite, nor even clumps of daffodils. Let us not fear, then,
that Zeus may appear around there disguised as a bull to seduce Europa and
kidnap her with a warble of pleasure, carrying her far away on the
hindquarters of his horse, to there consummate his desire. Just as we do not
fear that the earth will open up, to release the steeds, black as night, that
draw the chariot of Hades, ready to grab Kore and take her with him to the
realm of the dead. We fear none of the gods, but we continue to fear their
effects. Even with tranquil scenes, a closed door is always a mystery. A path
whose horizon is disturbingly impenetrable and nearby it always casts a
shadow, a doubt.
The gods disappeared but they are still present. In the envy they have
of humans, in the stories that after them continued to be told.
9.
Helios is the one that sees everything. He is the one who tells Demeter
that her daughter, Kore, was kidnapped by her uncle, Hades, while she was
gathering daffodils in a remote field. This is how Demeter learns that she must
resort to Zeus to recover her daughter. Light in the midst of darkness, the sun
that sees everything only reveals. He does not act. And we cannot even look
him in the eye.
10.
Equilibrium was one of the chief dreams of the Greeks. In Delphos, in
the same temple on whose pediment was written the saying always attributed
to Socrates, Know thyself, two gods dwelt alternatively. Apollo and Dionysius.
The dividing of the time between the two was done in an apparently unequal
manner: nine months for the former, three for the latter. But the Greeks knew
that reason can be sustained for a longer time than insanity. Dionysius is the
god celebrated at the time of the harvest. Everyone knows, because
Aristophanes said it, how the drunk women were mad, taken by the soul of
the god, who celebrated the Thesmophoria, those feasts drowned in trodden
grapes. For that reason, the lunar god, the god of rudeness, had only three
months of the year. The rest of the time, the other more judicious god, intense
and solar, could shine.
11.
We haven’t heard the stars for a long time. Most of us, probably, don’t
know that they ever had a voice. Also gone is the notion that these heavens
are organised in a geometric way, being superimposed with rational and
multiple theories in an order that explains the heavens. We have also stopped
being the centre of the universe. We’ve even lost god, and we have been left
alone. In the probably infinite, probably finite universe, certainly endowed with
many doubts, geometry remains. A gift as endowed with a mind as any other
literate being.
12.
The look is fleeting. Or perhaps we walk too fast to clearly see the
forms. So lines are transformed into textures. We realise what Duchamp,
Boccioni saw. Movement may also be a fragment. Both in time as well as in
space.
13.
What light would have fallen on the territory where Thebes arose? The
organisation of the heavens was repeated on the ground, and the city arose
serene and harmonious, like a celestial body. From Thebes, this inheritance
came to the West, a wonderful treasure that shared the journey with the spoils
of life of Cadmus and Harmonia. But aren’t inheritances always like that?
For centuries, the desire for clarity persecuted the sages and the
copyist monks, illuminating books as if the letters, slowly drawn, would shed
light on the pages, which were also clarified by paintings in gold and carmine.
It is said that someone with a clear soul can be read like an open book. The
alphabet has fused with our cells. We are what we read. Thus, even without
saying its name, we resurrect Thebes from the ruins and celebrate its
prodigious legacy.
14.
The horizon closes over Kore, when the earth closes up again after
Hades chariot has passed. Up there on the surface, the flash of Helios was
clouded with blood. It is the blood of Cores sacrifice, who would be called
Persephone after her infernal wedding ceremonies were consummated.
In Hades, all is black and death. Black is also obscurity and
ambiguously finite and infinite. Dwelling place of the abyss, it represents
decline, the absolute mourning. How can one love in the neighbourhood of
Tartarus, the river inhabited only by souls? Brief shadows that were bodies,
they are like the traces of strokes in a painting.
But Hades wants only this woman, the woman he gathered while she
gathered daffodils, the flower created by the gods to remember the youth
Narcissus who, in his rashness, died of love and loneliness.
Above this world of silence, Helios will tell Demeter where her
kidnapped daughter is. Demeter will succeed in convincing Zeus to help her
recover Persephone. But before leaving Hades to meet her mother, the young
woman will break the fast of hell, eating three pomegranate seeds. Red. The
colour of blood and fire.
15.
The spiral is time, the hand that draws the lines. The line is the vestige
of the hand. The indication of the drawing. In the same way that stars can only
be seen at night, opposites mutually explain each other. It is only against the
blackness that light is tangible. A line that looks at itself, that withdraws into its
house looking at its own soul.
16.
Music has a mathematical soul. Not only because the strings of the
lyres are exact in their measurements so that everything comes out with the
harmony dreamed of. But because it ought to certainly whisper some of the
archaic secrets of the music of the spheres.
A closed window may perhaps make us hear better that which is within
us that can still echo the songs of old.
17.
Turned towards the sky, the structure repeats the harmony of the
celestial lines. The parallel lines go well with the infinite.
18.
It was atop the nimbus that the gods sat. Beyond the clouds lay the
immortality of those beings.
One day, when the immortals lapsed into forgetfulness and another
god, greater and omnipotent, eternal and omnipresent, appeared on the
horizon, and it was on a nimbus that his presence also rested. But, if we look
closely at the clouds, beyond the white or the black, in the direction of the
infinite blue, we may still hear the disturbing voices of the Olympians,
upsetting the thunder of the one god who took over the place and the
thunderbolt of Zeus.
19.
All the elements of the construction refer back to the rationalisation that
the architect projected. Everything he thought of assumed a form. But for all
that, the thought and the gesture are not really less clear-cut. Isn’t it evident
that the hand passed through here?
20.
Organisation is also repeated in the city of the dead, in the last resting
places where the body is delivered to return to the infinite and the soul is
detained in other quests. Just as we do not see the whole of life, we do not
witness the whole of death. Even in the face of the unfathomable we arrange
our thought. The heavens then acquire a perfect mirror, even if in a thousand
little pieces. Even if in a brief fragment. The only absolute we encounter is not
that of the memory of the living, of the witness of their passing so that we
remain in the shadow. It is the absolute of geometry. The victory of reason
over the abyss.
21.
When Daedalus built the labyrinth in which to imprison the monster
who devoured youth, he certainly never suspected that one day he and his
son would suffer the same fate as the Minotaur and be confined there. Just as
he never would have dreamed that his wings for freedom would cost the life of
the young Icarus. Behind a wall there are always forests and monsters. High
dreams and their extremely high cost.
Behind a closed door, the roaring of the terror. We can pass by in front
of it and go on our way in calm, or we can halt in the face of the mystery and
demand an answer. Will the door open?
22.
Kore leaves the house one bright morning. She arranged to go into the
countryside with her girlfriends to gather daffodils. Demeter, her mother, is the
goddess that rules over all that springs forth from the soil. Trees, grain,
flowers. Demeter has no more reason to worry than any other god of
Olympus. Kore is a young maiden and nothing disturbs her desire for a
perfume.
23.
The friends set off for a long outing, determined to pick as many
flowers as they can. In the distance, in the middle of the field, Kore catches a
glimpse of a more verdant patch, and without saying anything to her
companions, ventures out, attracted by the greenery. Helios, the sun, watches
her from on high. All goes well, even in the strange calm that comes before
the storm. The rest, we already know: suddenly the earth opens up and
Hades snatches the maiden into his chariot drawn by four pitch-black horses.
It all happens so quickly. They immediately fall into the depths and the earth
closes in around them. There are no other witnesses, except for the one
already mentioned.
The young maidens do not know how to explain to Demeter that they
lost their friend. Demeter cannot explain to herself how her daughter
disappeared. She asks for help. She roams the earth, loses interest in her
obligations. So the world languishes and wastes away. The trees lose their
leaves, the grain ripens and dries, the flowers wilt. Even the song of the birds
ceased. It is then that Helios becomes empathetic. And he tells her what
happened. Demeter sets off in search of help. Zeus intervenes. He bargains
with Hades. The young woman, even though the marriage is consummated,
must return to her mother. Hades concedes. So be it. But will it be thus?
Hades cannot resist the company of Persephone. He wants her always
at his side. And although he had given his word to Zeus, he contrives a
cunning ploy. Before the young woman returns to be with her mother, he
gives her three pomegranate seeds to eat. She swallowed them without
thinking.
Upon seeing her mother, they joyfully embraced. But Demeter also
knows that the gods are jealous. She also knows that happiness is never total
and perfect, that the gods will spy on their own, just as they spy on humans
and punish them.
Tell me, daughter, did you eat anything? And Persephone says she did.
24.
Demeter knows that one can never see the whole picture. For that
reason, the year began to be divided into two halves. Zeus is called to
arbitrate the question and decides: Persephone will spend half her time in
Hades, with her divine husband. The other half, on the surface of the earth
with her mother.
Who can criticise Demeter for rejoicing only six months of the year?
Even though our science divides the narrative in another way, we know. It is
at the equinox in March that the door opens. An open window over a garden,
the earth celebrates the reunion of mother and daughter. We give it an exact
date: 21. And a unique name: Spring.
There follow six months of goodness. And when it ends, who can
blame Demeter if she loses interest again? This moment also has an exact
point: 21. And its own month: September. And a unique name: Autumn. When
the earth opens and Persephone returns to Hades, Demeter grows dark. And
everything around her.
The picture can never be whole again. And for that very reason, the taste of
the pomegranate is so sweet and so bitter.
Two golden eagles
Airplanes are the golden eagles of Harmonia’s collar. The two birds
that keep the two serpents that form the body of the collar from biting. The
birds prevent the fatal union of the reptiles, the mortal ring of time, the
consummation of the perfect circle and, simultaneously, disaster, the return to
chaos. The Indian peoples of North America also believed that the light of day
had been won in a mortal combat between reptiles and birds, from which
these had come out the victors. For that reason, in their honour, they wore
headdresses of feathers.
Airplanes, even with their biographies of war, are also guardians of
peace. But today, at the base of our fear, they constantly symbolise other
losses.
Behold, yet another metamorphosis. The eagles transformed into
airplanes are no longer the saving birds. There inside, in the bosom of the
metallic body, we are Icaruses hoping not to come too close to the sun. There
are always those who fear to defy the gods. No matter how high they dream.
Besides this ever-present fear, what imprisons us today is the
possibility of being hostages of other Trojan horses. In the belly of these
enormous eagles, we are easy prey. Unable to fly on our own, we are at the
mercy of the skill of some and the incivility of others. There are no wires to
hold us. It is the return of the Furies.
In the direction of the west
The house is structured in accordance with a programme.
To programme is to anticipate the problems, face them with solutions
that divide the space in accordance with the needed functions. Mirror of the
body and culture, the house reacts to the little square, the fragment.
Here we have the fire, sacred or profane, the fire for the food for the
soul and the more prosaic one that feeds the body. Here we gather together
to celebrate the word. The table is the divine altar, but a civilisational one, as
well. Here we celebrate the organisation of the alphabet. Here we open
books, we read, we write, we draw.
Here we do our ablutions, here we sleep, here we love, we lose ourselves in
order to find ourselves in another. Here we keep our treasures, lost letters,
echoes of words, affections, deaths, forgotten thoughts. The moments of a life
all fit here, in the navel of the world, in the setting for our acts.
However, what we remember, what we narrate is always partial,
despite the logical sequence. They are the accidents that are inscribed in the
material. Not only the evil, but the obstacles, the resistance to death. It was
this continuity that allowed it to arrive in the West, its taking root, its
permanence. This is the house of god in the West. Far from Olympus, and far
from Thebes, the plural and prolific gods have a unified face, even though the
mystery assigns it three places in heaven. Understand or arrive there by faith,
that is all.
In the end, everything is summarised into something that is essentially
very simple.
The house – whether of god or man – is always structured in
accordance with a programme.
Gifts endowed with a mind
Sartre wrote, cynically, that hell is the others. He was referring to the
impossibility of escaping the judgement of the other, turning our conscience
into an obligation. I cannot be as I wish, do everything that comes to mind, on
pain of suffering the harsh penalties of responsibility and the law. The others
are an imposed conscience, a repression of my ego.
However, the storytellers, the enquirers of the world, the more restless
and beneficent spirits, are also a part of the other.
Husserl, who did not have the command of the flourish of the word as
well as Sartre, but who was more intimate with the emotion of the “logos” and
the secrets of how to share it, knew it was not so. The other is not hell. It is
the one who comes up to us next to the fire to challenge the narrative line.
The other, as any letter of the alphabet, only functions in a multiple code, in a
game of hide and seek, part of a cloth that, even though torn and in tatters,
continues to cause our tired skin to remember the caresses.
[FERREIRA, Emília, “In the beginning was the drawing”, in catalog of the
exhibition Cadmo e Harmonia, Casa da Cerca – Centro de Arte
Contemporânea, Almada, September 2007]