Mere Space
There is no melancholy in the recent works by Waltercio Caldas, there is disconcertment. A diffuse, tonal palette of colors, simultaneously warm and somber, unfolds across the paintings/objects, while the spaces created by the sculptures are a constant conflict of scales and movements. Nothing sits easily with the conventions of our regular orientation. Here, our gaze is drawn inwards by a suggestion of depth; there, it is expelled by reflections on a surface; here it is drawn outwards by a movement of lines; there, it is focused on the interplays of forces leading towards the center of the work. A topological instability pervades his poetic language.
We live in challenging times for art and for politics. On the one hand, the brash statements typical of the social media world suppress all reflectiveness. On the other, a proliferation of voices and narratives displace established positions and force subjectivities to rethink their forms of orientation. Everything is urgent and we are all swept along by time. It is increasingly imperative for us to displace the ways we inhabit the present.
Contending with certainties and accelerated time is surely one of the political dimensions of art. But this process doesn’t come about without some friction, without us loosening the links between ways of seeing and modes of identification, which have the effect of reducing what is visible to what is known. To use some unfashionable Kantian terminology, the task of art is to recover the productive dimension of imagination; to make time for perception and the latency of the unknown that pulsates within it. This means rejecting the apotheosis of representation as communicative transparency and espousing opacity in defense of the latency of meaning in time.
In recent conversations with Waltercio Caldas in his studio, one important issue he raised was his concern at the way the experience of art—sculpture, drawing, or painting—has been reduced to the imagistic dimension. How to bring back the tactile, physically present, multisensory aspect of the life-world. How to be mindful of the presence of things. How to make time to notice, condense, retain, associate, see again, not see, come to see. How to keep hold of the helplessness inherent to the experience of the unknown, of emptiness. This exercise is part of the poetic equation proposed in these works.
A small painting on cardboard from 2017, algodões perplexos [bewildered cotton], provides a clue for understanding what I am trying to say. I mention this work, but I could mention several others in this exhibition, all of which insist on defamiliarizing the visible. In all of them there is a marked tension between image and perception, between the elements of cognition that delineate the figure and the experience embedded in sight and embodied in imagination. What is seen matters less than what the seeing implies to us, to the ways we see. The tension is between representation and presence. I would go so far as to say that sustaining this tension is one way of defending the political dimension of art and imagination. And therefore one way of confronting and shouldering the challenge, and the malaise, of aesthetics. Time is experienced differently in art and in politics; it is a difference we must accept.
At a time of political imperatives, as indicated above, the bewilderment of the visible seems robbed of its poetic strength. The difficulty of appropriating meaning and transforming it into a cognitive or normative utterance makes it seem useless. But this is a productive uselessness that has the power to subvert the dominance of instrumentality. Caldas’s works deliberately resist the opposition between meaning and utility, as if different compositions of time and space could arise from their poetic bewilderment, without which the urgency of everyday life would lose strength. To deny such a possibility would mean denying the role of art in expanding imagination beyond the field of possibility.
As the philosopher Jacques Rancière wrote in a recent essay, “the war over the reappropriation of precarious time might be the beginning of a new connection between collective and individual ruptures.” Precarious time has the power to disrupt the determinism of knowing how to see, exposing the insecurity inherent to imagining different ways of seeing. A kind of politics of subjective insurgency against the imperatives of a politics that imposes objective positions and identities upon us.
The halftones that predominate in Caldas’s recent paintings have the effect of intensifying a perception that oscillates between depth and surface, light and shade. Nothing is shown, everything is hidden, fleeting glimpses. If in his drawings the line is simultaneously precision and delirium, in these paintings the color is impetus and opacity; it is what vibrates in the canvas and thwarts any figurative intent, any tacit recognition. In his book Velázquez there is something of this nature: the erasure of the figures gives way to a mysterious interaction between light, opacity, and time.
This erasure serves to introduce a dynamic field of visual energies into mere space. The interplay between surface and depth, light and shade, color and blur, absence and presence, only exists in space, in the presence of something that can only be in the here and the now. Space as a condition of possibility for our experiences, what allows us to be in the world, the earth, the body. Mere Space speaks of the inherent concreteness and intensity of space, which is always about a situation I inhabit together with other beings, things, gestures, and movements. The Cartesian separation between “I know” and “I feel” has never belonged in the aesthetic experience materialized wherever feeling and thinking connect. At its root, the malaise in aesthetics stems from a rejection of the modern epistemic division and reinstates our corporeality, with all the wonderment and uncertainty it brings.
This reinstatement is everywhere in Caldas’s work. In his paintings the displacement of perception occurs most notably between surface and depth; in Estátua [Statue] the tension is between body and mass. There is a strong suggestion of a bodily presence but little material density. All the mass is concentrated in the wooden pedestals. Resting upon them are three small marble cubes, which in turn hold up the work itself: a hollowed stainless steel body painted white, drawing a confluence of movements and directions in space. Balance and instability, fragility and strength. With every movement we make around the piece, something disappears and something else appears.
While in Estátua the gaze is drawn entirely outwards—the graphic design projects us in different directions—in Ainda Não [Not Yet] everything is concentrated in the center of the piece, at the suspended encounter between a floating cup and a model resting in the middle of a stainless steel structure. The inversion of scales, the unexpected tension of opposing elements, the interplay between transparency and opacity, lend the sculpture a muted and delirious vibrancy.
What is most striking in Caldas’s latest work is the proliferation of poetic situations in which he combines and creates tension between sculptural elements, like volume and gravity, pictorial elements, like light and transparency, and graphic elements, like lines and cuts. This logic, or rather, this ethic of coexistence between differences is part of the politics of these works. And while this coexistence is sometimes uneasy, sometimes tranquil, it is always empowering of what matters most in art: the capacity to suggest new possibilities where everything seems settled.
In Waltercio Caldas: Aparelhos, written almost fifty years ago, Ronaldo Brito makes a point that resonates even today in the artist’s poetic language:
A Borgian procedure: to represent representation is the equivalent of problematizing it, introducing some niggling doubt to the stability of a plot (…) the work seems to carefully set up a scene, only for it then to not put on the show, or perhaps to subtly muddle it. Methodical organization is needed to build precision apparatus, even if it serves the purpose of marking out Nothingness, delimiting Void, or, perversely, Doubting its own data. Without this method, nothing works: simply exhibiting Void does not produce Void-like effects. And the function of the apparatus is to convey Concrete Effects of Voids.
Caldas has retained much of this procedure, even if his poetic language has moved in directions that were unthinkable back then. But representing representation to problematize it, as seen in Velázquez, is in many of the paintings in this exhibition. Most obviously in a painting depicting an empty stage, with the transparency of the curtains at the side and the scene held in suspended tension. Nothing is shown and much is suggested. The precision apparatus that marks the contours of nothingness is the sculptural happening that occupies the charged spaces between the volumes, lines, tonal colors, and atonal rhythms of many of these works. More importantly, this apparatus, this conveyor of concrete effects of void, is what constitutes mere spaces, what makes the emergent here and now an ontological uncertainty. What happens to be may not be. The included third is what makes art an exercise in bordering on the impossible.
“The transparent majesty wants more air, spaces with no figures. Its fate is to dissipate the surrounding ground.” In this materialization of uncertainty, Caldas’s work holds taut the thread by which art defies the obvious, the commonplace, established identities, imperatives, evidence. It is this that makes his work political—displacement—in a world desperately sure of itself as it heads purposefully towards the abyss.
Luiz Camillo Osorio
March/April 2024
