BIOGRAPHY

Delson Uchôa, 1956

Lives and Works in Maceó

DELSON UCHÔA – EXPERIMENTING WITH LIGHT

My first personal contact with Delson Uchôa, whose work I had known for a while, was at Faxinal das Artes, an artistic residency program held at a paradisiacal village out of time and space – an old camp created to house construction workers building a dam. Later, the government expanded and adapted this camp nestled in a foggy and cold mountain region in the state of Paraná, in southern Brazil, to accommodate public school teachers taking part in continuing education programs. And so it came to pass that, in May 2002, the usually tranquil settlement was suddenly shaken up by the lively activity of 100 artists coming from all parts of Brazil. In their respective cottages and workshops, these artists worked animatedly, as they eagerly discussed aspects of their works and of art in general, and celebrated the extraordinary opportunity of taking part in a rare residency program organized in Brazil – a program that gave them a chance to meet their peers and to take a necessary break from the tough everyday life of Brazilian artists.

Delson Uchôa set a contrast in this bustling atmosphere. Oblivious of the surrounding hubbub, Uchôa worked under a circus canvas that he set up and turned into painting studio, as the cottage assigned to him was not large enough for his intended large-format works. During the two-week program the artist remained cool and collected, immersed in his daily painting activity. The artist’s work and the way he worked held a close resemblance to the demeanor of men and women in the state of Alagoas, the small state of northeastern Brazil in which Delson Uchôa lives, who devote themselves to weaving baskets, bedspreads and tablecloths. Both the attitude and calm manner with which he bent over and painted the huge canvas stretched out on a table, or yet instructed and accompanied the careful effort of the few students/monitors appointed as his assistants, revealed the same patience of skillful basket weaver who painstakingly intertwine assorted fibers– rice, corn or coconut straw– to create the curved planes in baskets; and the same skillfulness that women demonstrate when interlacing color threads for days on end, creating quadrangular grids that later they stretch out on wood frames, to make woven bedspreads and tablecloths with the “filé” lacemaking technique, and also with another technique that consists of fraying textiles and working the frayed areas with thicker threads – a type of lace that is fittingly called “labirinto” (labyrinth).

Uchôa finished his painting practically at the end of the event. And when everyone joined together for the closing assembly, the organizers had hung his large painting like a banner in the round auditorium, at his request. Even though he sat among his peers, the painter chose to remain silent, for at that moment his work was speaking louder.

The artist’s self-removal from all noise and his particular mode of communicating with others via his work were not a result of a potential shyness in view of a system of compulsory socialization as that in Faxinal das Artes. It was the repetition of a same reaction that one day led him to leave Rio de Janeiro, a city where he lived for the greater part of the 1980s and where he trained as an artist, to return to Maceió, the seaside capital of the state of Alagoas where he was born and presently resides. True, he did not return to live in the city, but at a remote beach. He returned to the northeast, possibly less because of the city, and more because of the light that, in that region close to the line of the equator, is particularly vivid. He also returned with the intention to blend the experience and the repertoire acquired throughout years of travels and highbrow reading, with the experience and the repertoire gathered during his childhood at the beach, in close contact with people and trades that, in principle, could be said to be simple and commonplace, but that in practice -- judging from the exuberant colors of house façades, hammock weaving, basketry, and also the woven mats, tablecloths and bedspreads that they produce, and the way in which they celebrate their presence through colorful and luminous bundles -- are extremely sophisticated.

For a few decades now, the fusion between the so-called highbrow culture and folk culture has been viewed as a problem for a large number of Brazilian artists, a way for them to resolve the complex feeling of people who live in a society that is deeply divided, in which opulence, corruption and ostensive spending coexist with new versions of most stricken misery. In his song lyrics -- the “power of dough [that] erects and destroys beautiful things” – composer and singer Caetano Veloso refers to the implacable capitalism in its most savage guise, a procedure that involves decimating the intelligence that dares to germinate in poverty. Beginning in the 1930s, writers such as Jorge Amado and José Lins do Rego, and painters that included Di Cavalcanti and Alberto da Veiga Guignard acknowledged the greatness and dignity of the Brazilian people, which they duly represented in a way that was less easy than mere pamphleteering and paternalism. In our country, social inequality has always been as visible as the favelas hazardously perched on the hillsides of Rio de Janeiro, a city that, albeit “marvelous”, today serves as dumbfounded arena for a war between its two classes of inhabitants, the poor versus the rich. Should the artists have been heard, should the expressions of those who live on the hillsides and low-income suburbs have been taken into consideration, possibly the situation would have been quite another. In the 1950s, the educated segments of the country's population, led by such individuals as composers Tom Jobim and João Gilberto took to listening to samba compositions by Noel Rosa, Cartola and Assis Valente – and, to an extent, thanks to the samba, the bossa nova was born. It was only at the turn of the 1960s that the educated population represented by filmmakers Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos and their peers began to notice the deep social contrasts and the epic character of some passages of Brazilian history. The appearance of the so-called Cinema Novo is owed to them. It was only in the 1960s that admirers of Kasimir Malevich, dodecaphony, Concrete music, and Jean-Luc Godard, led by Helio Oiticica, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and José Celso Martinez, declared their love for Carmem Miranda, Jimi Hendrix and the Brazilian “samba schools”. What is more, upon devising the improbable mixture of Soviet vanguards, electric guitars, and “shrimp and chayote stew” (a gastronomic delight of popular extraction, sung by Carmem Miranda) and putting into practice the phrase “in adversity we thrive”, which Oiticica adopted as a motto, they created Tropicalism and the off-circuit Teatro Oficina, among other memorable productions, and they drove Brazil’s visual art production to maturity.

Delson Uchôa has a direct lineage back to this branch. His readings of Dante and Joyce and the knowledge he gathered from paintings by Matisse, Rothko, Torres Garcia and Oiticica prevailed in face of the colorful amusement parks, decorative designs on truck side frames, and street market stands selling beverages and miscellaneous goods, or yet the clothes items washed in the river and set to dry on rock beds that glitter under the sunlight, etc. The aim of Delson Uchôa’s poetics has always been to represent the ultimate color, which becomes visible when colors not only touch, but clash with one another, and vibrate from this contraposition. At this point, which coincides with the artist’s maturity, Uchôa overcame the stage in which his production was nothing but an illustration of his thought, to convert it into his own materialized thought.

So, this luminous experience inside the studio began quite naturally, to the point that I avoided discussing such subjects as temperature, color contrasts, opposing colors, etc. That is where we stopped and began to qualify light with adjectives, to humanize it. First it was the merry morning light, the austere noon light, the melancholy early evening light that dramatizes the world and kindles love affairs. Later, it was in my paintings and inside the studio, the walls and ceilings of which were painted all over, and there was all that paint peeling off… The paint peeled off here, a new color was applied, but pigment was always covering the environment, you know? That's where I managed to perceive the warm light, the dewed light. From then on, never again I spoke about light in the manner of a physics textbook trying to explain light.

Understood as a construction of intricate logic, impervious to the comprehension of naïve people, labirinto (labyrinth) --which as we have already mentioned is a name that brings to mind the refinement of bedspreads, tablecloths, and other decorative linens made with this technique and that serves as nourishment for the artist, due to its popularity – ends up treated as something of little importance and ordinary. This treatment is extended to those who work with labirinto ---the basket weaver, the lace maker, and the embroiderer -- as well as to people in other occupations the roots of which are lost in time, as we are called to remember by the mythological figures of the three Greek Fates –Klotho, Lachesis and Atropos–, who controlled human life by spinning the thread of life, tending it, and finally cutting it.

Having said this, Delson Uchôa’s painting reinstates the dignity expressed in the human capacity to bring together and weave loose threads, which is equivalent to drawing expansion and force from something that is linear and fragile. In the case of our artist, the loose threads take part in diverse experiments, in the specific times of everything that he has seen and that in his painting is presented in the convergence of color lines, arranged side-by-side, vertically or horizontally, or crisscrossing orthogonally to define territories, color fields, and light fields that resound in the environment. In his paintings, the colorful threads - which is referred to in this way because to a large extent they are produced with pigments diluted in acrylic resin and applied linearly -- are as thick as blood vessels and seem to conserve something of the gestures that created them. They are also irregular, they oscillate in a manner so gentle that the ruler and, even more so, the machine are incapable of. If Uchôa’s works reveal the significance of tradition, they simultaneously evoke the constructive tradition advocated by Oiticica as an atavistic datum of the Brazilian visual culture, an impulse that, according to him, was enhanced by the legacy of Concrete artists whose careers began in the 1950s, catalyzed by the thrust of industrialization as well as by more specific actions, such as the seminal exhibition dedicated to the work of Max Bill, held in 1950 at Museu de Arte de São Paulo–MASP.

But if on the one hand geometry is a recurrent datum in Delson Uchôa’s painting, on the other hand his painting is protected from the syndrome of globalization that eventually could hint at it having been made anywhere in the world: his work asserts its own condition as a Latin, Brazilian painting made in the Northeastern state of Alagoas. There is no trace of provincialism in Uchôa’s work, he does not incur in the defense of a purportedly “more pure” aesthetics, “unaffected by international influences”. His painting emerges, above all, from the need to experiment, which in his case may be translated as a plunge into color and light. A proof of this is not only in the explanation of these data as a phenomenon of merely physical roots, but also in its description as a phenomenological event viewed in the way in which, as we have said, the artist qualifies color and light, humanizing them. In the same manner, one should take into account his work process, namely the life-size scale of his works, the dimensions of which are capable of involving the viewer's body, a fact that in itself reveals Uchôa’s relation with architecture. Further developing this reasoning, the artist ended up transforming the space in which he has produced his oeuvre, i.e., the house and the workshop at which he has lived and worked for the past nine years, into a definitely active element. In his own words, everything started with the painting of walls and ceilings overflowing to the floor, which is something that happened nearly by accident, in his attempt to seal the hard dirt floor shared by all the rooms, and susceptible to the friction of a broom that wore it off, producing dust. Uchôa’s application of resin, the same that he employs on his canvases, made him realize that, if applied in several layers, the resin could be torn off, along with the imprints and fragments from the floor. His next step was to draw color lines, forming square patterns throughout the floor, in the manner of tile joint lines; and then, consistently with his painting style, he created large color areas. The artist was keen on the relation of artwork with the floor, and the fact that the peeled-off paint picked up fragmented materials, and also the marks imprinted on the floor by furniture items and footsteps of the several local residents. Above all, Uchôa had intended to “create a painting environment and live inside it.” He was keen on experimenting with the continuous change in lighting, which reverberated on the floor, walls and ceiling, altering the color temperature of the different environments throughout the day.

When transferred from home studio to exhibition venue, the large dimensions characteristic of most of Delson Uchôa’s paintings – which can be hung in such a way as to remain loose in space and allow viewing from both sides – in combination with the application of multiple paint layers superimposed on existing paint layers, that is to say, paint over paint, ensure the near integrity of the peeled surface. Indeed, the reversibility of some of these works, which encourage touching and feeling – making it virtually impossible for the viewer to resist the impulse to reach out and touch the grain of color rendered into thick, colorful lines – is a result of the artist’s concern with urging anyone who comes into touch with his works to become more intimately aware of the warm, “affective” character of light. While citing a nearly mythical passage of contemporary art, namely the plane crash in which German artist Joseph Beuys was severely wounded, the artist suggests that the viewer’s contact with his own paintings could bring about the same curative effect that saved Beuys’ life, when he had his body covered in fat and wrapped in animal skins. In any case, to know Uchôa’s paintings one forcibly has to visit their inside, inhabit them momentarily in an environment of high chromatic temperature, and celebrate the intimate contact with light. Let us agree that, in a world in need of genuine experiments, this is not little.

Agnaldo Farias