THE LAST SHAMAN

It is late March 2009, and Luis Geraldes gazes from the verandah of his rural property in Australia over the impenetrable line of eucalypts in the gully below. The foliage presents a dense wall of that dark green of the gum tree, but through the tall trunks one can see a clear incarnation of death; the ugly scar of the bushfires that ravaged this mountain country in the recent summer apocalypse.

Geraldes was one of the lucky ones. He was evacuated twice as the fire sped towards their property before miraculously veering onto another course. From his verandah one can feel the byzantine and capricious shifts of the wind, the force of nature that suddenly chose not to destroy the years of work stored in Geraldes studio. It is an apt environment to pause and consider the work of Luis Geraldes. The birds are returning to the fire stricken region and the magpies hover, attracted to the smell of a sumptuous feast on the verandah. There is excellent wine. It is an afternoon that suggests that life itself can be a celebration. Yet all around are the memories of death and loss. In many ways this contrast is the stuff of Geraldes work; life and loss, light and dark, the delicate, trembling line between this mortal coil and the next.

For much of the last three decades there has been a distinctly anti-romantic trend in the visual arts. The academics took over the asylum and terms such as ‘postmodern’, ‘appropriation’ and ‘second degree’ have dominated both the verbal and visual language of art. The French theorists, a la Deleuze and Baudrillard, were the ones to cite. Anything that even hinted at mystery or the sublime was dismissed as, at best, retrograde, at worst, that most ridiculed of terms, romantic.
This has been the period of cool, but it has been so cool as to see visual art coated in a cold veneer of permafrost.

But in Luis Geraldes’ work we see the beginning of the thaw, the start of a new spring. Indeed, even in the burnt out blacks and grays of the forests near his home, hints of bright green new growth break through the blackened charcoal. Despite the best efforts of academe, Geraldes oeuvre is, in fact, a part of a far larger picture that refutes the cold posturing of postmodernism. Three major exhibitions put lie to the chilly mythos of contemporary art making even while the postmodern was attempting dominance over discourse. In 1987 Maurice Tuchman organized the massive The Spiritual In Art – Abstract Painting 1890-1985 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1989, curator Jean-Hubert Martin presented the spellbinding Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou. And in 2000 the Art Gallery of New South Wales presented the breath-taking Papunya Tula: Genesis & Genius. Clearly, despite the post-Warhol pop-aesthetic, another tradition was living on, even quietly thriving, one full of belief, magic, spirituality and the potential mysticism of science. This is the tradition that the work of Luis Geraldes clearly lives within.

By demonstrating the huge impact of mysticism and the occult on 20th-century artists from Gauguin to Pollack, Mondrian to O’Keefe, The Spiritual In Art effectively refuted the fallacy that modernism is concerned solely with line, form, and color. Topics as diverse as synesthesia, theosophy, alchemy, hermeticism, the Cabala, and Zen were re-examined and re-introduced into global discourse. This was a world that Geraldes had already embraced. Indeed, in 2003, in keeping with this trend, Geraldes completed his Master of Visual Art thesis, Importancia da Energia Na Arte (Visions of the Esoteric Power). His investigation of the spiritual through painting remains a clear articulation of his desires.

And desire is what Geraldes’ work is essentially about. The paintings in this exhibition contain the stuff of the erotic, of the sublime, of birth, death and re-birth. These are restless paintings; there is the horizon, hints of distances to travel, both physically and spiritually. There are waves of energy crisscrossing the skies; lines that have the feel of the array of emotions known to human kind – love, anger, melancholy, Compassion. There are constellations that guide us on our way. There are embryonic eggs hinting at the birth of higher powers; homunculi of unknown gods; rainbows emerging from bowls of secret fluids.

At times it is not difficult to read Gearldes’ work in an almost literal sense. There is the interminable desert. In the sky are ancient symbols – the pyramid – and more recent symbols – the wonderfully abstract motif of nuclear and atomic power. But these are ghosts. What lives most powerfully here is the rainbow; strangely inverted as though ready to consume the world, a gaping vortex of colour. And it is colour that is of greatest import here. Geraldes’ palette ranges from the brazen and primary essentials – bold reds and yellows – through to misty and romantic pinks and blues. He is unafraid to juxtapose these extremes and in so doing creates a palimpsest of emotional states.

Indeed, this is an artist who has created his own world. Here ectoplasm hovers in the sky as the multi-hued sun emerges from the sea. Geraldes’ is a story that is as ancient as man; a creation story, the beginning of life, a throbbing, erotic, pagan story about the birth of both colour and spirit.

The surreal landscape of the Antipodes has clearly impacted strongly on Geraldes’ recent work; the infinite horizon line, the strange rock formations and termite mounds that jut abruptly from the red soil. He was born in Portugal but spent his formative years in Africa, a country steeped in ancient superstitions and a place where the kimbanda, or sorcerer, maintains a core position in village life. Today Geraldes lives on the traditional lands of the Kurnai, the local aboriginal people. The land around Geraldes’ property is crisscrossed with Dreaming Tracks, a land that remains under the sway of the deities Punjil and Pallian.

Geraldes seems attracted to the ‘spiritual’ in the same way a moth is attracted to flame. His first-hand experiences have been supplemented by rigourous research into everything from the teachings of the Knights Templar to the esoteric mysteries of the Cabala. But, as we can see with this body of work, Geraldes was not content to linger in the world of the arcane. Throughout these paintings we see hints of other languages; those of astronomy and DNA, mathematics and alchemical equations seem to squirm on the canvases. Hints of biological beginnings blend the creation egg with the alchemists forge and the scientific petri dish. While Geraldes may remain, at heart, a romantic, he is a romantic with a scientific eye and a linguists’ love of communication.

We see this when we seize, at random, a series of Geraldes’ titles for his works. The result is remarkably coherent, an accidental piece of poetry:

All Things
Embracing the eternal sacrifice
The Force of Life, Holding Together
Shadows Through the Eternity
In Reverence

The themes are clearly transparent, but that is not to say that they are simple. Attempting to articulate such themes on canvas is akin to juggling mercury; they are slippery creatures. In our cynical age, trying to capture notions of the eternal, of love, of belief are akin to heresy. The postmodernists have no truck with such concepts. The fire that we once sat around, telling stories of creation, passing down myths and lore, has been extinguished.

But Geraldes does not accept that fact. He will not go quietly into the night. He knows that, for all the cool logic of mathematical and scientific knowledge, strange mysteries remain behind the calculus. He has stated that his work exists to assist “the mind to contemplate the invisible.” He is the necromancer who can rally the lost language of the other side. He is the Shaman who talks with the invisible forces of the spirits, channeling them for our erudition.

Indeed, he may well be The Last Shaman.