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There
are artists who are authors of their own works. Others
are victims of the same. It seems to me to be Manoel
Costa's case. The eruption of his painting is so furious
that it subjugates, dominates, impels him to various
styles, dazzles. The rhythm and intensity of the brush
strokes reflect the eruptive fury of the desire to paint
with his contained emotion. The painting is the author
of Manoel Costa and not the other way around. When trends,
impulses or influences emerge, he has hardly dominated
them when they are already put into action in a painting
or fragment of canvas. When it seems that "he finally
found himself," there is a new transformation, maddening
of interior light, a twisting of form, obsessive returns
to the first themes.
Manoel Costa only needs to head toward the post-Modern.
He does not seem to want to, the good slave of beauty
that he is: small attempts with collages and soon the
return to his passion for figures and meritorious social
content, the anonymous work of people in activities
that uncontrolled exploitation and technological development
try to kill every day.
His figurative passion is helped by the sense of pictorial
spectacle from which he does not withdraw. There is
no fascination for that which is easy or, on the contrary,
conceptual or introverted.
Manoel Costa does not seem interested in discourses
on painting: he is painted by it, the concerns of the
artisan with emotions of the artist with the wish to
make an expression, use the material, challenge himself
at every moment, not retain inner flows from an excess
of concepts or intellectual fears. Directed by color,
he dominates the brush strokes, does not appear to vacillate
in the face of excessive castrating self-criticim. He
tries comprehension, wants to communicate, inflame with
color and light his manifestations, caring little if
his themes are repetitive; he wants to bear witness
to everything and everyone: the witness, not the revelation.
A victim of the noble vocation of witness, a type of
lay brother in a religious order of believers in the
emotion of painting, under the empire of "Tone", Manoel
Costa fills the greatest goal of the creator: to put
technique, vocation, talent and social and political
conscience at the service of art without any pretension
of reforming it, discovering directions or repeating
discourses arising from its power centers. He only tries
to paint, as a natural gesture, something that flows.
From there the vibration of light and form comes without
difficulty, contraction or pretentious expressions.
The obtaining of form without effort, with immediate
decodification, gives him the quality of an artist who
attains his goals by the wisdom, sincerity and simplicity
of not having put them far from himself. This non-omnipotent
dimension resulting from his work gives it definition,
concretion, acceptance, perenniality, besides the adorable
flavor of Brazil that places him among the painters
of cultural resistance, among the uncolonized in a country
of so many neo-colonized…
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