136 East 74th Street, New York, NY, 10021 +1 212 472 7770 info@edelmanarts.com www.edelmanarts.com

PAULO LAPORT

May 22 - July 3, 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.

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

“

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 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

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.

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.”

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)

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

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

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

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

TWYTE 2012 oil on linen 17.7 x 17.7 x 1.6 in (46 x 46 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

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