Chandelier POV
Mariana Machado
The philosopher may well imagine, before his candle, that he is witnessing a world in flames. For him, the flame is a world that tends toward becoming. The dreamer sees in it his own being and his own becoming. In the flame, space moves, time stirs. Everything trembles when the light trembles. Is not the becoming of fire the most dramatic and most vivid of all becomings?
— Bachelard, G. La Flamme d’Une Chandelle
The contact between subject and reality is affirmed as soon as we encounter a world that floods our senses. Faced with the chaos that comes to us, in colors, sounds, or smells, we create mediations, points of view. We thus cut the world into pieces: into objects, people, days, desires. It is the manifest image. Through this image, we interact with the world and, giving it continuity, we develop progressive abstractions. With them, we construct a scientific image. It is through these two images, and their contradictions, that we develop the knowledge that structures our relationship with the world[1]. For Gaston Bachelard, the manifest image, or immediate experience, is an obstacle to the scientific spirit, which develops independently of it. On the other hand, parallel to the enormous importance of the scientific spirit, Bachelard reiterates another knowledge, also of a metaphorical nature, with equal relevance, developed through the manifest image: he associates it with imagination.
Rúben Fernandes' exhibition ‘Chandelier POV’ presents a series of paintings which, as indicated by the title, are grouped together from the point of view of a chandelier. The alliance therefore extends across these two ideas: the direction of the painting towards work on an explicit perspective and the centrality of the object characterized as a light source. In this sense, we find a succession of frames where the perspective is both decisive and displaced, whether from superior viewpoints—as in ‘Nuclear Geography’ and ‘Studio Map’[2] —or in the representation of the backs of the canvas—as in ‘Terreno-avesso’ and ‘Espinha’—for example. Within outlined frames, often internal to other frames, we find closed spaces, marked by boundaries that determine the interior of an observatory. The paintings seem to suggest controlled areas, where space seems to take on a role of domination. Perspective is always evident, through the visible lines that make up the space, but it is also always displaced, altered by the becoming that inhabits it. In these spaces, we find light—more or less literally—as a mutable phenomenon in constant motion: it materializes the contrast with the rigidity that schematizes the composition. Inside, phenomena arise as sensitive becomings that escape the will to organize and capture.
Through doorways or behind window frames, the phenomenon finds space to materialize in sensory perceptions. Whether it is the light of a candle or a lamp, the painting ‘Nuclear Geography’ determines the protagonism of this shapeless stain that assumes itself as permanent becoming. Even in ‘Studio Map’, where the element of light is absent, it star is the studio space, where, surrounding the artist, represented as small, we find the space of creation as a moment of imagination that expands uncontrollably. This confrontation between rigidity and fluidity parallels the confrontation between rationalism and imagination that, for Bachelard, characterizes the scientific method and sensitive production: "Sometimes we marvel at a chosen object; we accumulate hypotheses and daydreams; we thus form convictions that appear to be knowledge. But the initial source is impure: the first impression is not a fundamental truth. (...) All objectivity, duly verified, refutes the first contact with the object. It must, first and foremost, criticize everything: sensation, common sense, even the most constant practice (...) The axes of poetry and science are initially inverse. All that philosophy can aspire to is to make poetry and science complementary, to unite them as two well-defined opposites. It is therefore necessary to oppose the expansive poetic spirit with the taciturn scientific spirit, for which prior antipathy is a healthy precaution."[3]
We can see this tension in Rúben Fernandes' paintings. Not only can we see it as a demonstration of the sensitive area in which painting occurs but also represented as a tension that defines our entire experience of the world. In this sense, this centralization of the luminous element, observed so directly—in moments such as ‘Alquimia’ or ‘Breach’—presents us not only with the specificity of a phenomenon to be grasped—similar to an unfolding by scientific method—but specifically an element associated with fleeting becoming that contrasts so literally with the rigidity of observation. It is in this sense that Bachelard emphasizes the importance of the element of fire: "Fire is no longer a scientific object. (...) Fire is, therefore, a privileged phenomenon that can explain everything. If everything that changes slowly is explained by life, everything that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the very essence of life. Fire is intimate and universal."[4] In this way, fire specifically presents the inexplicability of the world, the escape from the scientific image. The flame, in a candle or lamp, as a point of contact between reality and this element, forms the condensation of fire at a point, presenting the becoming of fire surrounded by a boundary. Hence the enormous importance that Bachelard also attributes to it: “The flame was, then, for a dreamer of worlds, a phenomenon of the world. We studied the system of the world in great books, and behold, a simple flame—oh irony of knowledge! —comes to pose its own enigma. In a flame, is the world not alive? (...) The dreamer had on his desk what we might well call a phenomenon-example. A substance, common among all, produces light. It purifies itself in the very act of giving light. (...) In the flame, philosophy finds a phenomenon-example, a phenomenon of the cosmos, an example of humanization. Following this exemplary phenomenon, ‘we will burn our iniquities’.”[5] It is these exemplary phenomena that we find repeated in these paintings, whether literally in the images of flames or even in the representation of movement itself – particularly evident in “Excavation site” and “Espinha.” There is a confrontation between the tireless attempt to capture and the constant escape of the ever-distant world. In a space defined by the rigidity of the line that rationalizes, it is confronted with the fluidity that escapes it, deformed and meaningless, which acts without interpretation. Faced with the flame, or the phenomenon-example, the subject sees himself as such. Bachelard calls it imagination. We don't have to call it anything, we can just enjoy its light and the possibilities of freely enjoying that point of view.
[1] We refer here indirectly to the ideas of manifest image and scientific image according to the thinking of Wilfrid Sellars. See: Sellars, W. Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.
[2] Os próprios títulos apontam para ideias de imagens cartográficas.
[3] Bachelard, G. (1992). La Psychanalyse du Feu, pp. 11-12.
[4] Bachelard, G. (1992). La Psychanalyse du Feu, pp. 13, 23.
[5] Bachelard, G. (1992). La Psychanalyse du Feu, pp. 19-20, 30.
DESCARREGAR: FOLHA DE SALA
DOWNLOAD: EXHIBITION TEXT
PAINTINGS IN EXHIBITION
