A UNIVERSAL CLOAK

Due to various circumstances that are not relevant here, I wrote about Luís Geraldes a long time ago, in 1992, when he was showing his works in a gallery in Chiado. I had no idea who he was, but his work—strongly colored and somewhat inclined toward primitive expression, which I later came to associate with certain African and Aboriginal art, confirmed again through the artist’s time in Angola, where he went to live at the age of four and from where he returned to Portugal in 1975, and Australia, the country where he has lived and worked since 1985—caught my attention in a particular way.

At the time, his work appeared to me as something different from what was being done in Europe, and specifically among us Portuguese, where discussions around postmodernism, minimalist proposals, and neo-conceptual trends were the most relevant. The organization of his pictorial compositions, the magical sense of color, the use of symbolic elements of ancestral inspiration from diverse origins highlighted an expressive dominant that could just as easily be rooted in art brut currents and in various forms of informalism. At the same time, one perceived the painter’s need to develop a balanced mediation between the construction of the paintings and the aims of a fully achieved formal and chromatic freedom, which was still in a stage of maturation.

Later, Geraldes exhibited several times in Portugal in different venues and more recently created a large iron sculpture: half bird and half human figure, with a crescent moon on its head, entitled Seagull, symbol of the Algarve region, which is integrated into the Open-Air Sculpture Museum and displayed at the Vila Sol Golf Course.
If the sculpture, in terms of figuration, clearly identifies with the painting—as we can indeed see in the present exhibition—suggesting protagonists constructed in painted wood who come to life, step out of the paintings, and acquire volume, it is also worth highlighting another work in ceramics created in 2003 in Australia, whose language develops in full articulation with the rest of his oeuvre.

It is a large mural about 30 meters long and three meters high, placed in Sydney on a street in the Portuguese neighborhood of Petersham. This ceramic mural, made of around eight thousand tiles, took a year of work to complete, and we may say, in summary, that it evokes the history of the universe from the Big Bang and the adventure of humanity throughout history until the present day. It is a bit of this elaborated memory that Geraldes has presented fragmentarily in his exhibitions. Fragmentarily because it sometimes embodies cycles, series, or desires for a representation of space, time, and the history of the universe and humanity, crossed by different modes of making.
Particularly in this exhibition at Arqué, that articulation—even with the Sydney mural—can be explored in the larger canvases entitled Transient Images, Fragility of the Divine, Bristling Energy, and Man Is Contained in the Universe and the Universe Is Contained in Man. The titles bring us back to the themes Geraldes has always worked on and investigated: the relationship between the material world and the spiritual world, between science and art, between microcosm and macrocosm, the identification of the five elements, the division of the canvas into five parts, the passage of energy, and the space–time binomial. Regardless of the identification of certain symbols such as the cosmic egg, the mandala, DNA, the atom, or cell division, these works cultivate a latent imaginary, a kind of magma representing the “collective unconscious” that Jung referred to in his writings.
In these large paintings, as in others, the painter accesses mechanisms of semi-automatic production, where the control of everyday logic is weakened to make way for a freer expression, closer to the vital forces that inhabit us and that, strangely or not, bind us to the rest of the universe—simultaneously energy and matter. Placing the canvases on the ground and throwing paint onto the surface, somewhat in the manner of the dripping process used by Pollock, Geraldes creates rhythm and deciphers forms. Is mere chance responsible for the result—just as, in the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci suggested?

In fact, it is also the painter’s making, bringing to the surface what was buried. Thus the paintings may associate waters and mountains with female nudes or with imaginary animals; they can reestablish the breath between earth and sky and fertilize the cosmic egg once again, rehabilitating a spiritualist vision and not only an esoteric one, as has sometimes been said about the work of Luís Geraldes.

Many of the works that depict figures shift toward the representation of the mask, as in At the Edge or Floating Existence in a magma of blues and greens, or inspire more complex readings in Fragments of Life or Fragments of a Dream, where the bird appears, identified in other canvases as the bird of paradise. Alchemy is also present in Show Me the Way, In Search of a Lost Legacy, yet the cutout figures with bird heads and multicolored bodies, as in Called to Prayer, indicate an ancestral register that draws upon magical rituals and the masks used by shamans and that echo those memories from the times in Angola, now intertwined with the more recent experiences of the Australian continent.
Thus, Geraldes has been able to elaborate a language shaped by neo-expressionism, articulating the synthetic and symbolic power of representation in ancestral cultures with the economy of comic art and the communicative power of graffiti, while also aligning himself with other contemporary artists, including Australians. Over time there have always been visual artists who explored the speculative paths from theosophy to eschatology. And indeed there is a history to be recalled—from the ancient search for the golden rectangle in sacred geometry to the representation of perfection that Almada Negreiros’s panel Começar also reveals.

From chaos to order, from hell to the heavens—or the reverse—the abyssal descent and the vertigo of the occult, all of this can be perceived in the painting of Luís Geraldes. But it will remain as a mantle of magma from which everything arises and to which everything returns: the torrid oranges and reds that never fade and that vibrate with the greens of the waters and the blue.