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PAULO LAPORT

May - July 2013

Essay by Charles A. Riley II, PhD

PAULO LAPORT On the Edge

Words and paint are often at war. If ever there was an

artist who defies ekphrasis or theoretical analysis it would be

the arch-painter, Paulo Laport, the painter of paint. He has

thrown “intellectuals” out of the studio for taking the wrong

end of the brush (“You have to have the courage to talk about

the paint itself ”) and forgetting the primacy of the medium.

“No tales, no external stories to articulate the exercise

of painting,” he sternly admonishes the writer. This liberty is

offered to the virtuoso—we must not ask too precisely how

the feat is accomplished. Whether in music, dance, or other

arts the moment of the dazzling technical performance, the

object of awe, often signifies a compositional breakthrough of

considerable risk and originality. In a recent book on aesthetics,

All Things Shining, that extols the way in which genius emerges

in “shining moments” that have a Nietzschean transcendence,

the authors Herbert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

progress from Homer’s Odyssey to Nureyev’s impossible

leaps and on to sports (human highlight reels such as Pele or

Michael Jordan come to mind) to convey the level of ecstasy

through performance that elicits wonder : “The great athlete

in the midst of the play rises up and shines—all attention is

drawn to him. And everyone around him—the players on the

field, the coaches on the sidelines, the fans in the stadium, the

announcers in the booth—everyone understands who they

are and what they are to do immediately in relation to the

sacred event that is occurring.” There is a luminous virtuosity, a

shining both literal and affective, in Laport that defies complete

accounting even as it elicits our wonder.

When the virtuoso swings into action, often the material with

which he or she begins can be relatively modest, like the air

upon which Bach would build the superstructure of variations

(the Goldberg edifice is the most obvious example). Laport’s

Cartesian grid and restricted palette are a case in point. He has

Barnardo: ‘Tis here!Horatio: ‘Tis here!

[Exit Ghost.]

Marcellus: ‘Tis gone!We do it wrong, being so majestical,To offer it the show of violence,For it is as the air, invulnerable,And our vain blows malicious mockery.”--Hamlet, Act I, Scene i

“

reinvented the grid to serve the paint in its viscous state.

Its systolic and diastolic pulse is all the more dynamic for

the gentle modulation of the never-straight edges (Robert

Ryman whispers in this way). Many of the vertical paintings

use broader middle horizontal bands and diminishing top

and bottom ones to bend the space of the painting (either

convexly or concavely depending on your eye), a volumetric

effect enhanced by the curved edges of LESKO, which

meet the frame in a tray configuration that is all the more

absorbing perceptually, accentuating the hemispheric cloud

of white on its left side. The rhythms of the grid, the most

regulated part of which is generally the super-controlled

vertical bands (twenty-five in all in DELFO, strategically odd-

numbered as a nod to symmetry), are defined by edges, not

lines. The titles, incidentally, are in capitals because they are

derived from navigational aids, vectors in effect, offered to

pilots as nodal points on a flight plan. Laport, who is trained

as a pilot, says, “I really don’t know how to name things,

but ZENIT for instance is a nickname for a crossing point

between two routes coupled with a number, and a control

tower will tell you to proceed to that coordinate, spelled out

precisely, and descend 2,000 feet, for example.” As unrelated

as possible to any verbal clue or suggestion of content, they

strategically leave the viewer hanging in the air.

The artist emphatically does not draw, or offer himself or us

any kind of armature below the improvisatory unfolding of

the layers upon layers of paint. The echoes of the geometry

have the power of the incantatory infinitives resounding in

the most famous soliloquy in theater history, as murmured

by Laurence Olivier perilously recumbent on a rampart high

above the crashing surf. The pedal point rolls in an hypnotic

barcarolle—“to die, to sleep…to die, to sleep, to sleep,

perchance to dream,” transmuting hesitation into the highest

order of poetry as only a Shakespeare, Proust or Mallarmé

could accomplish. Another analogy is offered by the rippling

arpeggios of Philip Glass (Laport adores his music), which

like the ostinato of good Vivaldi, redirect the listener from a

consciousness of the melody or harmony to the individual

quality of the tone itself, an effect that can be tried by playing

a simple Glass piece on the piano. It takes little or no effort

to recognize the truth of Glass’s own stricture that “all the

notes are equal.” Laport, who reveals under duress that he

is a drummer in a jazz combo (the construction of rhythm

is his role) has this to say about his love of music: “I listen to

the sound of the music, not the music. Same thing happens

in the painting. I’m not dealing with an image or a method.

It is a state of mind to perceive noise.” A similarly loving

precision is lavished on the paint, which is why the touch is

so admirable—those curls of impasto worthy of Hofmann,

those palimpsests—and Laport offers a fleeting glimpse into

the “how” of the studio practice:

What gives the sense of scale is the paddle and the brush. I

cut and design my own tools. A movement that doesn’t have

a strong track or mixes or glazes too much will ruin it. It is

not choreographed. I prefer to establish an austere approach.

Sometimes I have to take out of the brush the excess of

sensuality so as not to disturb what is going on. The work you

see that is made by the relief and tonalities. If I could do it

without the physical means I would. I calibrate the painting so

that both touch and vision work together. It is not geometric.

I am just following the edges of the colors. I cross one coat

over another. I start with a sensation that I cannot predict

or control, and then I follow this almost lurid image toward

something concrete. All the brush strokes finish as the first

start. Left to right, right to left, all the strokes are the same.

(Interview with the artist, April 23, 2013).

The structural wonder of major poems, musical compositions

and paintings like Laport’s is the way in which they open and

close many times before they end, by necessity at a “terminal”

edge which Laport (like Barnett Newman before him)

reluctantly renders contingent. The works on paper leave the

studio under glass, a la Francis Bacon who similarly relished

the distancing effect of the in vitro captivity within which

light paces back and forth reflectively. Laport unforgettably

applied bleach to a sheet of handmade paper because it bore

too much trace of the original cedar, its deep-hued burgundy

and lavendar, even under layers of paint, were like the whiff of

cedar’s equally insistent aroma. The finest expert on Laport’s

works is art historian Guilherme Bueno, director of the

Museum of Contemporary Art and professor of Brazilian Art

History at the School of Visual Arts in Rio de Janeiro. He

comments:

“In Paulo’s works everything is contained precisely to

‘calibrate’ the presence of the painting: the trajectory of

the brush and of the paint on the canvas cannot be called

gestural or austere; it is not neutral, rather it is anti-expressive.

The resulting mesh is not designed, but to call it spontaneous

would be to commit the negligence of looking for, outside

the geometry, an inconvenient emotiveness in it. That same

mesh actually reinforces the self-unfolding relationship

between the painting and the space that it simultaneously

occupies and founds. This slow painting, in which respect is

contradictory to the fast-moving modern world, requests of

us a perception that I would not call introspective (which

would make it sound romantic), but rather immersive (i.e.,

it requires accurate attention under prolonged exposition).”

One of the most original and eccentric aesthetic manifestoes

of our time is the tectonic theory offered (and quickly

forgotten) nearly two decades ago by the eminent historian

of Modernist architecture, Kenneth Frampton, to whom the

greatest building was the result of a constructive process

that weaves vertical and horizontal, whether in the joinery

of wood, the interlocking of brick, or the framing of glass

by steel. Like Laport, forwhom paintings are things not signs,

for Frampton a building is the work of the arche-tekton

(where tekton offers an etymological link to carpentry and

construction as well as poetry and weaving) that he brilliantly

links not only to painting but to textiles and even literary texts.

One superb example he offers (among signature buildings

of Louis Kahn, Renzo Piano, Mies and others) is Frank Lloyd

Wright’s La Miniatura, a brick and glass house he created for

Alice Millard in Pasadena in 1923 when he had nicknamed

himself “The Weaver.” It would be the ideal space in which

to hang these tectonic paintings. Early in the manifesto,

Frampton offers this perception that we can directly relate

to the constructed space of Laport’s painting: “Everything

turns as much on exactly how something is realized as on an

overt manifestation of its form. The presencing of a work is

inseparable from the manner of its foundation in the ground

and the ascendancy of its structure through the interplay of

support, span, seam, and joint—the rhythm of its revetment

and the modulation of its fenestration.” Even as an insight

into the transition in Laport’s painting from one support to

the other, canvas to oil, and the ways in which that influences

what is built, moment by moment, upon it, Frampton’s idea

has immense validity as a rubric for looking at art. If Laport’s

paintings occasionally suggest the shimmer of elegant Beaux

Arts façades (New Yorkers will be forgiven for thinking of the

delicate play of light on the Flatiron Building in the raking light

of morning), then the vocabulary of architecture might be

invoked to account, for instance, for the marvelous a literal

arched shadows under the hooded crowns of the architrave

surrounding Laport’s windows. Inside them, glassy auroras,

veined (horizontally in ORANS and ZENIT, vertically in

LESKO and DELFO) like metamorphic marble (speaking of

tectonic formations) in the palette of mocha and a range of

greys and whites worthy of Twombly, and, like him, conducting

the light of Turner. Inside these cells float lilacs and burgundies

that are shockingly vibrant in a work that reads from a

distance as silvered.

Move a step, dim or raise the lights, and the dance of

iridescence is initiated—pearlescent, opalescent, flickering

through a spectrum that shifts in and out of the high Cubist

palette of tans and greys. Great moments in realism have

invoked the optical amazement of iridescence—Jan van Eyck

and the Pre-Raphaelite Lawrence Alma-Tadema dazzled

viewers with marmoreal architectural settings while one of

the miracles of illusionism remains one of the tiniest passages

in paint, the nacreous earring itself, the most celebrated piece

of jewelry in art, that is the focus of Vermeer’s portrait of

an unknown girl. Laport eschews the representational, but

the optical effect (not the thing itself, as Mallarmé would

insist, but its effect) is irresistible and even a little shocking.

Consider the artist’s own view, offered during a recent studio

interview, which idiosyncratically but firmly adheres to the

physical process. Note the violent ending:

The paint remains almost raw on paper or linen, less

romantically it slants away from any possibility of illusionism.

My paintings are not allusions to things external to them.

On the contrary, they keep literally within what presents

itself. But the more austere they are in artifice, they become

more comprehensive to me. That’s the issue. Paddling and

brushing the paint drags and leaves their inscription while

adding more

paint. The modulation does not exist because the sense of

calibration given by the paddle and the brush, the width and

pressure, are done to pull out the undercoat in the coat

being applied over it. That’s why you see both dimensions

at the same time. The difficulty of doing means no falsifying

ease, and imperfections have to be perfect. It should create

a visual collision. Normally you approach to see small things.

And when you do, you are hit by a train.

The flight of the virtuoso, like the tenor at the top of his

range where cracking is always a possibility or the surgeon

for whom the slip of a scalpel is possibly fatal, is always

perilous. Laport knows full well that a chromatic harmony

as finely tuned as his or edgework as frangible as lace can

be ruined in an instant. He issues a vertiginous invitation to

conclude the interview, “Get close to the edge and see.”

Herbert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining (New York: The Free Press 2011), p. 201. Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1995) p. 26.

Charles A. Riley II, PhD is an arts journalist, cultural historian and professor at the City University of New York. He is the author of thirty-one books on art, architecture, business, media and public policy, including Color Codes (University Press of New England), The Jazz Age in France (Abrams), Art at Lincoln Center (Wiley), Rodin and his Circle (Chimei), and Sacred Sister (in collaboration with Robert Wilson). He is a guest curator at the Chimei Museum, Taiwan and curator-at-large for the Nassau County Museum of Art.

LEKSO (Detail)

LEKSO 2012 oil on plywood, wood and glass 64.6 x 55.3 x 2.8 in (164 x 140.5 x 7 cm)

RONIX 2011-13 oil on plywood 59 x 47.2 x 2.8 in (150 x 12 x 7cm)

SAXTO 2012 oil on linen 78.7 x 63 x 3.9 in (200 x 160 x 10cm)

DASER 2012 oil on cotton 28.7 x 23.2 x 1.6 in (73 x 59 x 4 cm)

KONIX 2012 oil on paper, wood and glass 44.1 x 32.7 x 2.4 in (112 x 83 x 6 cm)

DELFO (detail)

DELFO 2012 oil on plywood, wood and glass 63.4 x 47.8 x 2.8 in (161 x 121.5 x 7 cm)

KIWER 2011 oil on linen 13.4 x 13.4 x 1.6 in (34 x 34 x 4 cm)

KATSEN 2013 oil on linen 37 x 27.6 x 2 in (94 x 70 x 5 cm)

ELKAM 2012 Oil on cotton 47.2 x 31.5 x 1.6 in (120 x 80 x 4cm)

GAPSO 2011 oil on linen 28.3 x 19.7 x 1.8 in (72 x 50 x 4.5 cm)

TWYTE 2012 oil on linen 17.7 x 17.7 x 1.6 in (46 x 46 x 4 cm)

TWANSY 2012 oil on linen 78.7 x 63 x 3.6 in (200 x 160 x10 cm)

MAGMA 2011 oil on linen 13.4 x 13.4 x 1.6 in (34 x 34 x 4 cm)

ZENIT 2011 oil on linen 13.4 x 13.4 x 1.6 in (34 x 34 x 4 cm)

ORANS 2011 oil on linen 13.4 x 13.4 x 1.6 in (34 x 34 x 4 cm)

EZLON 2011 oil on linen 13.4 x 13.4 x 1.6 in (34 x 34 x 4 cm)

LACEN 2013 oil on linen 13.4 x 13.4 x 1.6 in (34 x 34 x 4 cm)

KALOX 2013 oil on linen 13.4 x 13.4 x 1.6 in (34 x 34 x 4 cm)

LEROX 2013 oil on linen 13.4 x 13.4 x 1.6 in (34 x 34 x 4 cm)

TUSKY 2011 oil on linen 13.4 x 13.4 x 1.6 in (34 x 34 x 4 cm)

RALOT 2013 oil on linen 15 x 12.2 x 1.6 in (38 x 31 x 4 cm)

DAKLO 2012 oil on linen 23.6 x 23.6 x 1.6 in (60 x 60 x 4cm)

SLATIN 2012 oil on linen 18.1 x 18.1 x 1.8 in (46 x 46 x 4.5 cm)

TOMKI 2011 oil on linen 70.9 x 47.2 x 2.8 in (180 x 120 x 7 cm)

LAURNE 2013 oil on linen 10.6 x 23.6 x 1.5 in (27 x 60 x 3.8 cm)

OPHEA 2013 oil on cotton 9.1 x 25.6 x 1.5i n (23 x 65 x 3.8 cm)

TORAK 2012 oil on linen 21.3 x 21.3 x 1.8 in (54 x 54 x 4.5 cm)

SPINO 2011 oil on cotton 35.4 x 23.6 x 1.6 in (90 x 60 x 4 cm)

RAKON 2012 oil on paper, wood and glass 44.1 x 32.7 x 2.4 in (112 x 83 x 6 cm)

PAULO LAPORTb. 1951, Rio de Janeiro

Education

1967-1969 Studied at Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1980-1982 The Art Students League of New York and Pratt Institute, New York.

Solo Exhibitions

2012 Marcia Barrozo do Amaral Galeria de Arte, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2000 GB Arte, Rio de Janeiro Brazil

1992 Galerie Lehmann, Lausanne, Switzerland

1989 Galerie Gerard Leroy, Paris, France

1986 Galeria Montesanti, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1981 Galeria Gravura Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Selected Group Exhibitions

1993 Lehmann Gallery, Lausanne, Switzerland

1992 Art Cologne Galerie Lehman, Germany

1991 FIAC Galerie Lehmann, Paris, France

1991 Musée D’Art Contemporaine FAE, Lausanne, Switzerland

1988 Galerie 1900-2000, Paris, France

1987 Oficina de Gravura e Escultura, MAB/FAA, São Paulo, Brazil

1987 Oficina de Gravura e Escultura, Museu Histórico do Estado, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1985 Velha Mania: desenho brasileiro, EAV – Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1984 Rio Narciso, EAV Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1981 4º Salão Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1980 Sotheby’s Park Bernet Gallery, NYC

1980 Rosto e a Obra Galeria IBEU, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1980 12 Gravadores Brasileiros, Baltimore, USA

1979 4ª Bienal de Gravura Latino-Americana, San Juan, Porto Rico

1979 1ª Bienal Italo-Latino-Americana di Tecniche Grafiche, Roma, Italy

1979 2ª Mostra do Desenho Brasileiro, Curitiba, Brazil

1979 Trienal Latino-americana del Grabado, Buenos Aires, Argentina

1978 2º Salão Carioca de Arte, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1978 1º Salão Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - Gustavo Capanema Award

1978 1ª Mostra Anual de Gravura Cidade de Curitiba, Curitiba , Brazil– Acquisition Award

1977 3ª Bienal Internacional de Arte, Valparaíso, Chile

1977 1º Salão Carioca de Arte, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1977 Arte Actual de Ibero-América, Madrid, Spain

1976 Bienal Nacional 76, na Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil

1976 25º Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

1975 Goiânia GO - 2º Concurso Nacional de Artes Plásticas Caixego , Brazil – Acquisition Award

1968 Rio de Janeiro RJ - 1º Salão de Verão – Museum of Morden Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Essay: Charles A. Riley II, PhDDesign and Production: Traffic www.trafficnyc.com

136 East 74th StreetNew York, NY 10021+1 212 472 7770info@edelmanarts.comwww.edelmanarts.com