The Magical Art of Luís Geraldes
It was André Breton who, in the later part of his adventurous life—after having invented and animated the two successive breaths of Surrealism, the historical one and the other, the traumatic one, through whose margins such unexpected names as Frida Kahlo or Wifredo Lam would enter the artistic scene, and after also launching, with Jean Dubuffet, the provocation of Art Brut, through which ever-greater indistinctions between art and non-art led to real confrontations, once more privileging expression over form—would come to defend what, following his friend Pierre Mabille, he called magical art.
What did magical art consist of?
In the affirmation of an expressive power that once again rejoined—religare—the thing of art to an intensity of effect and presence that reintegrated it into the realm of the symbolic. Breton’s travels, especially through Mexico, where Artaud had earlier sought the subtle connections between ritual and creative production, had led him to a deeper understanding of this intuition, already present in historical Surrealism through its esoteric character: the essential relationship between expression, presence, and the action of the artistic object as an activator of energies hidden or unmanifest on the plane of the viewer’s reality.
For André Breton—poet and creator of that major movement of the twentieth century, and certainly one of its most influential figures—art could not, indeed never could, confine itself to narrow relations with form and its avatars.
What art should carry within it, or else be of no use, were the instruments of that discovery of the mythical total man (and totalized within himself) of which the First Manifesto of Surrealism already spoke, in which there would no longer be opposition between what Western rationality, dialectical, had stipulated as contraries—whether day and night, high and low, dream and reality, etc. For Breton, as for the sage Heraclitus and for the most ancient Oriental thought, the notion of opposition denied an essential function of profound thought.
For all these reasons, Surrealism was far more influential throughout the twentieth century than it is fashionable to recognize today. As brilliant studies have shown, it would influence the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and, more broadly, the so-called New York School, which brought to American art its charter of independence and affirmation. It also reverberated in the brutalist poetics of the Cobra Group or the Lettrist International and later the Situationists. Its tremor would still be felt later in the Fluxus movement—particularly in Joseph Beuys—and later still in the rise of the wild, brutalist neo-expressionisms that entered the artistic scene in the mid-1970s.
In any case, and for what concerns us here, Breton’s magical art sought to rediscover the subtle threads that linked artistic creation with its deepest anthropological root, and even with its unmanifest but active dimension on the symbolic plane.
This brings us to the artistic work of Luís Geraldes, in which the return to the primitive source—especially Australian Aboriginal art, in the country-continent where he has been rooted for more than two decades—updates the expressionist strand with an expressive impulse that leaves form in a secondary position in order to highlight instead the primacy of the symbolic and, confessedly, the esoteric.
As Cristina Azevedo Tavares wrote very aptly of him and his art, the artist “was able to develop 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 being close to other contemporary artists, including Australians.”
Indeed, this tangible and prejudice-free search for elements drawn from both high art and popular art, in order to communicate something that lies beyond both, seems to serve the artist in manifesting, as active presences, certain magical or esoteric dimensions of art.
An initiate, he seeks in symbolisms that once interested thinkers of the occult and of the mind—such as Carl Gustav Jung—the archetypal, manifested in a symbolism that transports us to certain aspects of Templar wisdom as well as to ciphers of magical thought centered on powerful symbols such as the Cosmic Egg, or to references from Hindu cultures, later brought together in a search for harmony that metaphorizes, on the plane of painting, the harmony between heaven and earth typical of all esoteric quest.
As in the mysterious words of William Blake, the great mystical poet and painter of English Romanticism, this search of Geraldes could be synthesized in the violent and yet powerful assertion that “all religions are one,” as if, in fact and at a certain level, nothing could—or should—separate, in their integrity, what is human from what is divine in the magical and subtle understanding of a reality deeper than both and integrating them both.
For this reason, Breton’s designation of magical art can be aptly applied to this work. Indeed, its purpose is not decorative. Nor is it concerned with attempts to operate on the historical level of identifying with more or less contemporary trends and inserting itself into them as a transformer of the strict lexicons of artistic discourse.
On the contrary, the art of Luís Geraldes seeks itself in what would be an action meant to act powerfully upon its viewer and even upon the world, reconnecting him to the source of a knowledge previously unknown to him and through which he is joined to the world.
This will to world, contrary to what might be thought, does not consist of an escape from the real. On the contrary, it signals instead a profound connection to the deepest heart pulsing at the core of reality—
The very heart that all art, magical or not, aspires to touch.