«Caveiras, Casas, Pedras e Uma Figueira»

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caveiras, casas, pedras e uma figueira skulls, houses, stones and a fig tree

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CÂMARA MUNICIPAL DE LISBOA LISBON CITY HALL

ATELIER-MUSEU JÚLIO POMAR

EXPOSIÇÃO EXHIBITION

presidente | mayor António Costa

directora e curadora | director and curator Sara Antónia Matos

curadoria | curatorship Delfim Sardo

vereadora da cultura | councillor for culture Catarina Vaz Pinto director municipal de cultura | director of culture Manuel Veiga

coordenação executiva e comunicação | executive coordination and communication Graça Rodrigues apoio à curadoria e produção | curatorship and production support Pedro Faro serviço educativo | educative program Teresa Santos secretariado | secretary Alice Alves Isabel Marques parceria | partnership Fundação Júlio Pomar

produção executiva | executive production Graça Rodrigues Sara Antónia Matos apoio à produção | production support Beatriz Medori (estagiária / intern) Pedro Faro equipa de montagem | installation staff João Nora Laurindo Marta design gráfico | graphic design Paula Prates parceria | partnership Fundação Júlio Pomar, Caixa Geral de Depósitos e Fidelidade apoios | supports Fundação Carmona e Costa

Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar | CML Rua do Vale, 7 1200-472 Lisboa Portugal Tel + 351 218 172 111

agradecimentos | acknowledgements Alexandre Pomar Chiara Porcu Filipe Pacheco José Lourenço Soares Maria da Graça Carmona e Costa Pedro Lanhas Pedro Valdez Tereza Martha

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Júlio Pomar Álvaro Siza Vieira Luís Noronha da Costa Fernando Lanhas

caveiras, casas, pedras e uma figueira skulls, houses, stones and a fig tree

textos | texts

Sara Antónia Matos Delfim Sardo

d o c u m e n ta cadernos do atelier-museu júlio pomar

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Apresentação Sara Antónia Matos

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Exposição | Exhibition

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Do que falamos quando falamos de desenho?

Delfim Sardo

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Caveiras | Skulls Júlio Pomar Casas | Houses Álvaro Siza Vieira Casas | Houses Luís Noronha da Costa Pedras | Stones Fernando Lanhas Uma figueira | A Fig Tree Júlio Pomar

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Lista de obras | List of Works

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Presentation Sara Antónia Matos What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Drawing?

Delfim Sardo

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apresentação Sara Antónia Matos Directora do Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar

O Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar foi inaugurado no dia 5 de Abril de 2013. Cedo se constatou que os públicos que a ele têm acorrido são, em grande parte, oriundos quer do universo ligado às artes plásticas quer ligado à arquitectura. A este equipamento cultural assomaram escolas, amantes e profissionais da arquitectura, não apenas com o propósito de conhecer a obra do pintor mas também o edifício que a acolhe. O Atelier-Museu recebeu visitas específicas para estudar o espaço, analisar questões estruturais, a traça exterior da fachada e o pátio na retaguarda, examinar o sistema de fecho das janelas e outros pormenores técnicos que provavelmente escapam a leigos na matéria.

A atenção que o complexo arquitectónico desperta não é inusitada dado que a reconversão do edifício preexistente num espaço museológico é da autoria de Álvaro Siza Vieira, referência incontornável na matéria, o que constitui motivo de interesse para muitos especialistas.

Integrando o programa de projectos paralelos da 3.ª Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa, a exposição «Caveiras, casas, pedras e uma figueira», com obras de Álvaro Siza Vieira, Fernando Lanhas, Júlio Pomar e Luís Noronha da Costa, surge no terreno de convergência das diferentes disciplinas praticadas por estes autores, ao celebrarem a invenção que o desenho proporciona àquelas disciplinas, sobretudo quando alheado de convenções técnicas.

A curadoria da exposição foi entregue a Delfim Sardo, que há muito insiste na correlação entre as artes plásticas e a arquitectura, apresentação

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dando a ver a diferença, a necessária distância, entre aquelas disciplinas, mas também os vínculos inalienáveis que as fundam. Ambas laboram mecanismos de representação da realidade, mas enquanto à arquitectura cabe a concepção de espaços com capacidade efectiva para albergar o corpo, as artes plásticas podem ocupar-se dos domínios mais impalpáveis do habitar, gozando por isso de enorme liberdade.

Neste contexto, o desenho assume particular relevância, estabelecendo alguns daqueles vínculos. Através dele dá-se corpo às ideias, instauram-se as ossaturas do edifício, da casa, da construção. O desenho lança estruturas e coloca as primeiras pedras, mas também se instala como uma música, um ritmo, que leva o corpo a perscrutar os lugares mais íntimos, dando-lhes possibilidade de existência e fazendo deles realidades habitáveis. Como diz Pomar: «Desenhar talvez seja apenas cair na armadilha de um traço, captar o rasto da desregulação que restitui às coisas a sua presença.»

Envolvendo tentativa/erro, repetição e fuga à regra, o desenho permite trazer à superfície da folha uma imagem que antes não existia.

Este processo parece implicar um movimento que os artistas conduzem mas não controlam integralmente, como se o traço do lápis os ultrapassasse por momentos, incorporando figurações que os próprios desconheciam. Pomar fala desse instante mágico envolvido no acto de desenhar, assim: «Temas e variações: foi inspirado na música com que Matisse intitulou a publicação, em 1943, de uma série de cento e cinquenta e oito desenhos obsessivamente repetitivos. […] Quando o pintor se entrega ao “vício” de aparentemente se recopiar, as folhas de papel que recebem na sua brancura o jogo dos signos — signos que nunca serão os mesmos mas mais ou menos os mesmos —, essas folhas de papel, à medida que vão sendo maculadas, têm tendência a multiplicar-se como as folhas de uma árvore. Ainda de Matisse é esta observação: “numa figueira nenhuma folha é igual a outra; são todas dife8

sara antónia matos

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rentes de forma: no entanto cada uma delas grita: figueira”» [in Catch: Thèmes et Variations, 1983].

Em suma, talvez se pudesse dizer apenas que o desenho é guiado pela inteligência sensível, e o motivo mais que determinante para a exposição que o Atelier-Museu agora acolhe, numa colaboração desenvolvida com a 3.ª Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa. É também chegado o momento de fazer um especial agradecimento à Fundação Júlio Pomar que, de modo incansável e com a maior prontidão, tem apoiado os projectos desenvolvidos no Atelier-Museu, contribuindo assim para construir outras leituras sobre a obra do pintor.

apresentação

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exposição | exhibition

Sara Antónia Matos e Delfim Sardo (curador) durante a montagem

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do que falamos quando falamos de desenho?

Delfim Sardo 1.

Quando falamos de desenho colocamos dentro desta categoria os desenhos preparatórios de artistas, os desenhos de projecto, o desenho encarado como medium específico, os esquissos de arquitecto, os doodles de canto de página, as páginas de cadernos escolares cheias de reproduções de heróis de Manga, as indicações de direcção que garatujamos ou que nos dão para decifrarmos numa visita a amigos remotos, os resumos de conteúdos de reuniões, os organigramas, o mindmapping com que tentamos orientar as nossas escolhas futuras, os planos feitos em post-its, a escrita manual, gráficos, enfim, toda a actividade inscritora e descritora de processos de pensamento a partir de formas gráficas.

O desenho não é uma tipologia artística como as demais, mas, acima de tudo, uma prática. Uma longa e permanente prática que extravasa amplamente o campo do artístico para se diluir nas inúmeras tipologias de inscrição gráfica, fazendo parte da nossa aprendizagem da representação do mundo.

Se, numa primeira abordagem, este campo parece ser (e é) demasiado amplo para poder ser tratado como uma unidade (que não é), devemos então cingir-nos a um campo delimitado, cheio de regras de procedimento, cânones processuais, parâmetros de avaliação estéticos ou meramente qualitativos?

Não parece, sequer, que esse campo possa ser circunscrito, nomeadamente porque se existe, encontra-se sob o fogo crítico que o do que falamos quando falamos de desenho?

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carácter derrisório do modernismo fez abater sobre as práticas artísticas, desconfiando de uma característica fundamental e tradicional da prática do desenho no interior das belas-artes: o virtuosismo. Se atentarmos um pouco no estatuto peculiar do desenho no interior do ensino das artes visuais, facilmente compreendemos que o desenho possui uma semelhança curiosa com a aprendizagem musical, ou com o ensino da dança em termos clássicos. Em qualquer destes casos existe uma necessidade interna de promover uma proficiência que passa por ser não ideológica, isto é, pretende configurar-se como uma destreza da mão sem estilo, uma capacidade de representação desvinculada de qualquer ideia sistemática sobre os mecanismos e processos do próprio primado de representação que lhe subjaz. De facto, o desenho é normalmente ensinado como uma técnica de representação, um sistema de recursos que implica determinadas competências específicas, bem como o domínio de códigos, de convenções em relação à forma como o mundo pode ser convertido em linha. Repare-se: a sofisticação do desenho como processo de representação é inerente ao facto de o desenho ser o que não existe no nosso sistema perceptivo — o desenho é linha, demarcação, fronteira, contorno das coisas, convenção sobre o interior e o exterior.

2.

Nesse sentido, o desenho é uma complexa metodologia de representação. Por vezes é uma navegação dentro de sistemas representacionais com códigos fortemente delimitados, claramente codificados, como acontece com o desenho técnico ou o desenho científico.

Outras vezes, no entanto, o desenho — sobretudo quando usado em fases preparatórias dos processos artísticos ou arquitectónicos — parece existir numa aparente liberdade, corporalizando uma mitologia 28

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da arte ou da criação em geral, como o domínio do não-pensado.

Esta forma de encarar o desenho, que surge frequentemente ligada a uma mitologia do carácter hipoteticamente livre do desenho infantil, ou do desenho automático, foi instaurando uma segunda aporia, a de que o desenho é um campo que materializa uma ligação não mediada entre a mão e o espírito, como uma corrente eléctrica que deixasse sobre o papel uma marca que seria a evidência de uma verdade íntima e profunda da arte — a sua autenticidade tornada escrita.

3.

Creio, pelo contrário, que o desenho, sendo uma actividade que possui inúmeras utilizações e universos de relevância comunicacional, sofre, por isso mesmo, de uma grande dificuldade de limitação de campo. Esta delimitação, não existindo nem sob forma adjectivada, torna as coisas mais difíceis em termos de enquadramento, filiação e análise. A fotografia, que efectuou um percurso semelhante, desde a sua descoberta técnica ao desenvolvimento da sua versão canónica artística, à sua pulverização pela democratização da produção imagética e o seu resgate posterior pelo interior das práticas (e dos mercados) artísticos, possui, com enormes vantagens, a versão substantivada do adjectivo «fotográfico» que resolve muitos destes problemas da diluição social, funcional e epistemológica do campo. Fala-se do fotográfico e entende-se a referência a um campo que nasce da produção imagética da fotografia, mas pode, nomeadamente, investir-se noutros suportes, não sendo necessário pensar no que fica dentro ou fora desse campo esborratado. No caso do desenho, a dificuldade reside também na forma como a sua prática é parte integrante do nosso reconhecimento do mundo como representação, não produzindo, portanto, qualquer distância (estética, epistemológica ou cognitiva) do que falamos quando falamos de desenho?

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senão no momento em que não nos outorgamos competências na produção de imagens verosímeis ou miméticas. Dito por outras palavras, o desenho transformou-se muito cedo num problema de reconhecimento dos processos representacionais, o que é tanto mais surpreendente quanto nos lembramos que a democratização do desenho é, também ela, uma consequência da vulgarização do uso do lápis e do papel, ou seja, uma herança do século xviii. É o lápis que faz do desenho uma possibilidade transitória de representação — e de escrita — transformando a prática do desenho numa actividade não só cumulativa, mas também subtractiva. A partir da generalização do lápis, o desenho pode ser apagado, corrigido, refeito, passando a corporalizar uma poética do transitório e, portanto, também do campo didáctico como, mais tarde, o campo da experimentação por excelência. Neste âmbito, basta recordar o curioso e iconoclasta Erased De Kooning, de Robert Rauschenberg, para compreendermos a potência do apagamento como processo artístico concomitante com o desenho enquanto prática corrigível. Poderíamos dizer que, no interior do desenho como dispositivo de representação, existe uma tradição racionalista e experimental. Racionalista pelos dois momentos em que a sua afirmação foi essencial para as transformações das tipologias representativas (no Renascimento e no século xviii); experimental porque o desenho desenvolveu procedimentos nos quais a documentação e o registo, a compreensão da fenomenologia da visão e da representação, o carácter prospectivo e a produção de uma escrita tiveram lugar — por vezes mesmo a partir de regras gramaticais estritas, se bem que contingentes, como em Sol LeWitt.

Ora esta multiplicidade funcional e operativa é, no interior das práticas artísticas, acompanhada do desenvolvimento de poéticas, quer formais, quer discursivas, numa pluralidade de usos que não possui qualquer paralelo nas restantes metodologias de representação.

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caveiras | skulls JĂşlio Pomar

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Caveira, 1959, tinta-da-china e pincel sobre papel, 10Ă—14,4 cm

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Caveira, 1959, tinta-da-china e pincel sobre papel, 15,5Ă—15,7 cm

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Desenho do natural, uma caveira, Paris, 1963, esferogrรกfica, 20,7ร 13,5 cm

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Desenho do natural, duas caveiras, Paris, 1963, esferogrรกfica, 20,7ร 13,5 cm

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casas | houses Ă lvaro Siza Vieira

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Projecto de Haia, Jardim Van der Vennepark, Schilderswijk-Centrum [1985-88], esquissos de estudo, 29,7Ă—21 cm

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Projecto de Haia, Jardim Van der Vennepark, Schilderswijk-Centrum [1985-88], esquissos de estudo, 29,7Ă—21 cm

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Projecto de Haia, Jardim Van der Vennepark, Schilderswijk-Centrum [1985-88], esquissos de estudo, 29,7Ă—21 cm

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Projecto de Haia, Jardim Van der Vennepark, Schilderswijk-Centrum [1985-88], esquissos de estudo, 29,7Ă—21 cm

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casas | houses LuĂ­s Noronha da Costa

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Estudos para o projecto de Queluz, s/d, grafite sobre papel, 17,6Ă—23,2 cm

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Estudos para o projecto de Queluz, s/d, grafite sobre papel, 17,6Ă—23,2 cm

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Estudos para o projecto de Queluz, s/d, grafite sobre papel, 17,6ร 23,2 cm

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Estudos para o projecto de Queluz, s/d, grafite sobre papel, 17,6ร 23,2 cm

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pedras | stones Fernando Lanhas

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Máscara do Sonho 127, 1983, papel recortado, 31,5×19×24 cm

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Máscara do Sonho 127, 1983, papel recortado, 31,5×19×24 cm

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Máscara do Sonho 127, 1983, papel recortado, 31,5×19×24 cm

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Máscara do Sonho 127, 1983, papel recortado, 31,5×19×24 cm

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uma figueira | a fig tree JĂşlio Pomar

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Sem Título (Caderno de Figueiras) s/d [década de 60], tinta permanente sobre papel, 20×25,5 cm

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Sem Título (Caderno de Figueiras) s/d [década de 60], tinta permanente sobre papel, 20×25,5 cm

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Sem Título (Caderno de Figueiras) s/d [década de 60], tinta permanente sobre papel, 20×25,5 cm

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Sem Título (Caderno de Figueiras) s/d [década de 60], tinta permanente sobre papel, 20×25,5 cm

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Sem Título (Caderno de Figueiras) s/d [década de 60], tinta permanente sobre papel, 20×25,5 cm

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lista de obras | list of works

Álvaro Siza Vieira Projecto de Haia, Jardim Van der Vennepark, Schilderswijk-Centrum [1985-88] (Esquissos de estudo), 1985/86 Esferográfica, marcador, grafite, lápis-de-cor sobre papel e fotocópia 10 x (29,7×21 cm) Projecto de Haia, Jardim Van der Vennepark, Schilderswijk-Centrum [1985-88] (Planta e alçados, estudo prévio), 1985 Grafite e lápis-de-cor sobre papel vegetal 89×101 cm Projecto de Haia, Jardim Van der Vennepark, Schilderswijk-Centrum [1985-88] (Planta, cortes e alçados), 1987 Desenho técnico 61,5×102 cm 4 x (90,5×90,5 cm) Luís Noronha da Costa Desenho da Torre do Magoito, s/d Grafite sobre papel 2 x (34,2×47cm) Desenho da Torre do Magoito, s/d Marcador sobre papel 2 x (34,2×47cm) Sem Título (Cadernos de desenho), s/d Grafite sobre papel 34,2×47cm 30×21 cm Estudos para o projecto de Queluz, s/d Grafite sobre papel 5 x (17,6×23,2 cm)

Desenhos do caderno de Murches, s/d Grafite sobre papel 21×29,5 cm Desenho da Casa do Algarve, s/d Grafite sobre papel 21×29,5 cm Fernando Lanhas Máscara do Sonho 127, 1983 Papel recortado 31,5×19×24 cm Sem Título (Projecto de Baião), s/d Desenho técnico e esferográfica sobre papel 30,3×57,8 cm [N.º de pedra / ano] P 4-51; P 9-53; P 14-70; P 15-72; P 17-72; P 18-72; P 19-72; P 20-72; P 23-72; P 26-72; P 29-72; P 35-72; P 36-72; P 37-72; P 40-72; P 33-74; P 34-74; P 45-74; P 48-74; P 49-74; P 51-74; P 55-74; P 66-74; P 57-78; P 58-78; P 59-78; P 60-78; P 66-83; P 67-83; P 69-84; P 70-84; P 78-84; P 79-84; P 81-85; P 82-85; P 83-85; P 86-85; P 90-85; P 91-86; P 92-97; P 94-99 Pintura sobre pedras e seixos rolados Dimensões várias Júlio Pomar Sem Título (Caderno de Figueiras) s/d [década de 60] Tinta permanente sobre papel 32 x (20×25,5 cm) lista de obras

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Caveira, 1959 Tinta-da-china e pincel sobre papel 10×14,4 cm Caveira, 1959 Tinta-da-china e pincel sobre papel 15,5×15,7 cm Desenho do natural, duas caveiras, Paris, 1963 Esferográfica 2 x (13,5×20,7 cm)

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lista de obras

Desenho do natural, duas caveiras, Paris, 1963 Esferográfica 4 x (20,7×13,5 cm) Desenho do natural, uma caveira, Paris, 1963 Esferográfica 6 x (20,7×13,5 cm)

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presentation Sara Antónia Matos Director of the Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar

The Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar was opened on April 5th, 2013. It soon became clear that the people flocking to it largely come from either the world of the visual arts or the world of architecture. Schools, lovers of architecture, and professionals working in the field have come to this cultural institution to see not only the painter’s work but also the building that houses it. The AtelierMuseu has received visitors who have come specifically to study the space, to analyse structural questions as well as the exterior outline of the facade and the patio at the rear, to examine the system for closing the windows and other technical details that would probably escape the layman.

The attention aroused by the architectural complex is not unexpected given that the conversion of the pre-existing building into a museum was planned by Álvaro Siza Vieira, a giant figure in the field whose involvement has attracted the interest of many specialists.

Part of the programme of events for the 3rd Lisbon Architecture Triennale, the exhibition “Skulls, Houses, Stones and a Fig Tree”, which features works by Álvaro Siza Vieira, Fernando Lanhas, Júlio Pomar and Luís Noronha da Costa, emerges in an area of convergence between the different disciplines practised by these creators, celebrating the spirit of invention that drawing lends to those disciplines when it is distanced from technical conventions.

Delfim Sardo, who has long emphasized the correlation between the visual arts and architecture, has been entrusted with curating the exhibition, which reveals the difference, the necessary distance, between those disciplines as well as the undeniable links that bind them. Although they both cultivate mechanisms for representing reality, the job of architecture is to design spaces with the effective ability to shelter the body while the visual arts can concern themselves with more intangible areas of dwelling, thereby enjoying enormous freedom. presentation

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In this context, drawing takes on particular relevance by establishing some of those links. Through the practice of drawing, ideas are embodied and the skeletons of buildings, houses or structures are established. Drawing launches structures and lays the first stones. It also functions as a kind of music, a rhythm, that leads the body to investigate the most intimate places, making it possible for them to exist and turning them into inhabitable realities. In Pomar’s words, “drawing might be nothing more than falling into the trap of a line, capturing the trace of the disruption that restores presence to things”.

Involving trial and error, repetition, and a flight from rules, drawing allows a previously non-existent image to be brought to the surface of the page. This process seems to involve a movement that artists lead but do not entirely control, as if, in certain moments, the stroke of the pencil moves ahead of them, incorporating figurations that they themselves do not recognize. Pomar talks of the magic instant involved in the act of drawing: “Themes and variations: the title that Matisse gave in 1943 to a series of 158 obsessively repetitive drawings was inspired by music. (…) When the painter gives himself over to the ‘vice’ of apparently copying himself, the sheets of paper whose whiteness is marked by the play of signs — signs that will be roughly but never exactly the same — tend to multiply like the leaves on a tree. Matisse also made the following observation: ‘on a fig tree, no leaf is the same as any other; they all have different shapes: nevertheless, each one of them shouts: fig tree’” [in Catch: Thèmes et Variations, 1983].

In short, perhaps it could simply be said that drawing is guided by a sensitive intelligence and provides overwhelming justification for the exhibition that the Atelier-Museu is now hosting in a specially developed partnership with the 3rd Lisbon Architecture Triennale.

The time has also come to say a special thank you to the Júlio Pomar Foundation, which has tirelessly and very willingly supported the projects undertaken at the Atelier-Museu, thereby helping to construct other readings of the painter’s work.

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what are we talking about when we talk about drawing ?

Delfim Sardo 1.

When we talk about drawing, we are referring to a category that includes artists’ preparatory drawings, planning drawings, drawing treated as a specific medium, architectural sketches, doodles in page margins, the pages of exercise books filled with manga heroes, the directions we scrawl or are given to explain a long trip to visit friends, summaries of meetings, flow charts, the mind maps we use to make decisions for the future, plans made with post-it notes, handwriting, graphics — in other words every activity that inscribes and describes thought processes using graphic forms.

Drawing is not like other artistic categories. Above all it is a practice. An extended, constant practice that spreads far beyond the artistic sphere to become diluted as countless forms of graphic inscription, as part of the way we learn to represent the world.

If, on first consideration, this field seems to be (and is) too broad to be treated as a unit (which it isn’t), should we thus restrict ourselves to a defined field, replete with rules for procedures, processual canons, and parameters by which to make aesthetic or merely qualitative judgements?

It doesn’t even seem possible to mark the boundaries of such a field, since if it exists, it has been subjected to the critical fire that modernism derisively aimed at artistic practices, as a result of its mistrust of a fundamental and traditional characteristic of drawing as a fine art practice: that of virtuosity. If we give some consideration to the peculiar status of drawing within visual art teaching, it soon becomes apparent that drawing has a strange affinity with the teaching of music, or classical dance. In all these cases there is an internal need to develop a proficiency seemingly bereft of ideology, that is, it aims to develop a neutral manual dexterity, a representational ability detached from any systematic idea what are we talking about when we talk about drawing?

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about the mechanisms and processes of the underlying primacy of representation itself. Indeed, drawing is normally taught as a representational technique, a system of resources involving specific determined abilities, such as a mastery of codes and conventions for converting the world into a line. Note: drawing’s sophistication as a process of representation is inherent to the fact that drawing is what doesn’t exist in our perceptual system — drawing is line, demarcation, frontier, the outline of things, a convention about interior and exterior.

2.

In this sense, drawing is a complex method of representation. Sometimes it is a navigation through representational systems with codes that are strongly defined, clearly codified, as in technical or scientific drawing. In other cases, however, drawing — particularly when used in the preparatory stages of artistic or architectural processes —, seems to exist in apparent freedom, the embodiment of a myth that art and creation in general is the domain of non-thought.

This perception of drawing, which is frequently related to a mythology of the supposedly unrestrained nature of children’s drawings, or automatic drawing, established a second aporia, in which drawing is seen as the expression of an unmediated link between hand and spirit, a type of electrical current which leaves a mark on paper as evidence of a deep and intimate truth of art — its authenticity transformed into script.

3.

I believe, on the contrary, that since drawing is an activity with countless uses and realms of communicational relevance, it is, for this very reason, a field that is very hard to define. The lack of even an adjectival term to define these limits brings extra difficulties in terms of classification, affiliation, analysis... Photography, which underwent a similar evolution, from its discovery as a technique, followed by the development of its own artistic canon, its destruction by the democratisation of image production, and its subsequent rescue from within artistic practices (and markets), has a great advantage, in that the existence of a noun de150

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rived from the adjective “photographic” resolves many of these difficulties related to the social, functional and epistemological dilution of the field. The use of the term the photographic is understood as a reference to a sphere whose roots are the photographic image, but which can, for example, be manifested in other mediums, bypassing the need to consider what is inside or outside this blurred field.

In the case of drawing, the difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that drawing is an integral part of the way we recognise the world as a representation and, as such, doesn’t produce any (aesthetic, epistemological or cognitive) distance other than when we doubt our ability to produce convincing or accurate images. To put it another way, drawing very quickly became a question of recognising representational processes, which is all the more surprising when we remember that the democratisation of drawing is also itself a consequence of the popularisation of the use of the pencil and paper, a legacy, in other words, of the eighteenth century. It is the pencil that turned drawing into a transitory possible means of representation — and script — transforming the practice of drawing into an activity that is not only cumulative but subtractive. With the widespread use of the pencil, drawings could be erased, corrected, remade, and came to embody a poetics of the transitory and thus also of the educational sphere and, subsequently, the field of experimentation par excellence. In this context, we only have to consider Robert Rauschenberg’s curious and iconoclastic Erased De Kooning to understand the potential of erasure as an artistic process that is the natural corollary of drawing as a practice that can be corrected. It could be said that a rationalist and experimental tradition exists within drawing as a representational device. Rationalist by virtue of the two periods during which it played an essential role in transforming methods of representation (during the Renaissance and in the eighteenth century); experimental because drawing developed procedures in which documentation and recording, investigation of the phenomenology of vision and representation, and the prospective nature and production of a scriptural system found a place — sometimes even based on strict, if contingent, grammatical rules, as in the work of Sol LeWitt.

However this functional and operative multiplicity is, within artistic practices, accompanied by the development of both formal and discursive poetics, in a plurality of uses unmatched by other methods of representation. what are we talking about when we talk about drawing?

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4.

Within the context of architecture, drawing has yet another particularly interesting duality. On the one hand, drawing, whether as a form of note-taking, of representing the visual field, or as planning in graphic form, plays a major part in the architect’s work — and the development of an aesthetic by which drawings are produced, almost as diaries at times, describing trips, recording and making notes, is part of the aesthetics of the architectural process and is, at times, inseparable from the process and practice of planning. On the other hand, drawing is the medium for architecture’s rigorous representation, via a set of codes that runs through the architectural chain of production as such, as in scientific drawing, which can be read by the various participants in the architectural process and whose rules are learnt as a lexicon of translation.

However, even in this case, and particularly since the widespread introduction of digital processes, architectural drawing is characterised by the evolution of poetics of rigorous representation, in that there is ample scope for defining representational methods — and how frequently do the drawings of architectural students demonstrate a lack of aesthetics in the representation of their models.

The architect’s drawing has also come to replace, in the imaginary of the poetics of representation, the drawing of the sculptor, with which it shares a strange relationship between three dimensionality and its representational correlate in two dimensions. As sculpture broke away from statuary, it began to incorporate certain methods of representation derived from project related disciplines, in a transference that became increasingly established from the time of the Russian avant-garde onwards.

Drawing thus has an enormous resilience, an adaptability derived from the fact that it is a practice and not a discipline, a medium or even a device.

5.

The exhibition “Caveiras, casas, pedras e uma figueira” [“Skulls, Houses, Stones and a Fig Tree”] brings together drawings of many different types from 152

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artists and architects and, in two cases, from artists/architects. To provide some insight into the exhibition, I should explain that it came about as the result of an invitation which was made to me by the director of the Júlio Pomar StudioMuseum, Sara Antónia Matos, who asked me to conceive a drawing exhibition which combined architecture and art. The starting point was a group of drawings and prints by Júlio Pomar of skulls and skeletons — architecture of the body, if you will. Pomar’s skulls, of many different types and produced at many different periods, are not (only) evocative of the vanitas tradition, of confronting time and the fragility of existence. They have a much less symbolic, much rawer dimension, which is concerned with an attempt to understand the structure — in other words the reason behind the form — of a body. Naturally they are haunted by the spectre of Goya, or sometimes Bacon, naturally they are objects which vary greatly, ranging from annotations, to complex drawings, and even engravings. It was not these possible and legitimate connections that triggered my interest in skulls and bones, but because they provide clear evidence of the need to confront the material and efficient (in the Aristotelian sense) rationale of form and this attempt at understanding corresponds to a necessity which is part of the very genesis of the possibility of drawing as structure. During the preparation of the exhibition, a notebook emerged containing a large group of drawings of fig trees made in the first half of the 1960s. These drawings are not, in fact, of fig trees, but of the way in which a fig tree can be understood through the movement that a gentle wind creates within it. In all respects it is an exceptional group of drawings, virtually putting into practice Leonardo’s theories on drawing the wind — how can the unrepresentable be represented? Like Joris Ivens’s film (though much earlier) Pomar tries to draw what is not representable and achieves this, naturally failing (in each drawing) and managing (in the series) to touch on the problem of representing the ineffable, the subtle, and the elusive. In this sense, the opposition between the attempt to understand the fig trees (so solid and only fleetingly comprehensible) and the nature of the representation of the structural interior of the body (of what is invisible to us) that exists in the skull drawings correspond to two sides of the same practice of drawing, in its most touchingly humble form. what are we talking about when we talk about drawing?

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6.

From this starting point, the relationship with the architectural drawings of Álvaro Siza Vieira emerged as a result of the need to show entirely different methods of using drawing as a way of thinking about and understanding the creative process itself. The drawings of the Hague Project are presented here as model: the first drawing in the set is a working drawing, a drawing which almost allows us to imagine we have managed to glimpse the architect’s creative process, like a projective palimpsest in which multiple layers have been preserved, joined together by the fragility of adhesive tape, gradual, meditative and containing various examples of coexisting methods of representation. This drawing, as suggested by Siza Vieira himself, is contrasted with the precise drawings of architectural representation that followed, which provide clear evidence of the way that the architectural process is finally set down, as well as the variations between the different stages of the representational process of drawing. This group is followed by another, composed of freehand drawings, sketches, which correspond to yet a third example of architecture’s poetic methodologies.

7.

Luís Noronha da Costa’s drawings are architect’s drawings, though the artist is better known as a painter. Noronha da Costa’s career as an architect was intense, but only one completed project exists, the house in Algarve that is represented by a drawing in this exhibition. His other projects were never built, but many related drawings survive, which would need a more comprehensive exhibition. What is remarkable about the various groups of drawings brought together here is not only the insight they offer into the architectural thought of their creator (clearly the result of a deep-seated critical knowledge of both modernism itself and of various attempts to go beyond it), but also because they demonstrate a planning methodology based on freehand drawing, which is established as the operative principle of spatial thinking. It goes without saying that these are drawings of great skill and significance — which, paradoxically, 154

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establish a different context to his painting since the understanding of space that is instilled via drawing seems to dispense with the use of the three-dimensional model as an architectural tool. Space is represented, or re-represented as sculpture, but also as a scriptural investigation of its various operative and stylistic modes, in which it is almost possible to isolate each one of the drawings in its speculative dimension. Likewise, the inclusion in the exhibition of fragments of notes from the pages of one of the notebooks — relating to the “Murches Project” — reveals the presence of trial and error, of experimentation, rotation, correction, of morphological experiments with volumes, of interiors and exteriors, interspersed here and there with technical details. All of them are imbued with the same representational acuity and, above all, the same emphasis on the process of drawing as a method of thinking space.

8.

Finally, three examples of Fernando Lanhas’ work are shown: his painted stones, a sculpture which alludes to the structure of a head and an architectural drawing. Apparently very diverse, they correspond to Lanhas’ constant quest to find a way of measuring things which is expressed in various ways throughout his work, from his inscriptions in nature to painting, as well as his interest in cosmological — and in his scriptural, almost cosmogonic — order.

He started to work on the painted stones at the end of the 1940s and they are a key to the relationship between abstraction and concretion which runs through his work, a point of union between his gradual and reiterated interest in the order of the world and representation as a permanent attempt to understand it. Though they are paintings, they are above all interesting as drawings, in other words as graphic marks which create a different order to that of the structure of the pebbles, but a second structure of understanding.

This need to understand is also present in the mask, derived from a dream (which Fernando Lanhas systematically recorded) on the night of the 22/23 May 1983. In his notes, Lanhas wrote: “I dreamt I was studying the drawing of a map whose subject matter demanded great care and precision from me. In order to be able to make the work as I wanted, I was protected by a mask what are we talking about when we talk about drawing?

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which shielded me from the exterior and allowed me to continuously examine the drawing�.

9.

A continuous examination of drawing could be another title for this exhibition. Yet drawing is, in itself, a continuous examination: of processes for understanding the world, methods of representing it, the ability to produce representations, the limitations of representational processes, the possibility of constructing a graphic image which defines a poetics that, seeming to refer to what is external, is a recursive practice of understanding.

Nothing, therefore, is as unspontaneous as drawing, so saturated, so governed by protocol, so close to the concept. It is a line of demarcation, a frontier between a hypothetical interior and a possible exterior — and this is the shape of human thought: this is within, that is external; this line connects a point to another and this union establishes a separation; this is entangled with that and in this skein there seems to be a secret; this line is hesitant and trembles like the wind, or like a litany, and in this convulsion there seems to be wisdom.

Drawing is, therefore, a skeletal framework of the world as we are able to understand it.

Curiously, never as we manage to see it.

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A Colecção Cadernos do Atelier faz parte da linha de publicações do Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar, que abrange catálogos de exposições, actas de conferências, reedições de textos de autor e compilações de outros textos de reflexão, envolvendo a arquitectura, as artes plásticas e o pensamento crítico. A Colecção é dirigida por Sara Antónia Matos, directora do Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar, e conta com a colaboração de autores de diversas áreas de investigação.

The Atelier’s Books Collection is part of the series of publications by the Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar, which includes catalogues of exhibitions, minutes of conferences, re-editions of author’s texts and compilations of other texts for reflection, involving architecture, the visual arts and critical thought. The Collection is directed by Sara Antónia Matos, director of the Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar, with the collaboration of authors invited from diverse areas of research.

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Este catálogo foi publicado por ocasião da exposição Caveiras, casas, pedras e uma figueira, realizada no Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar, em Lisboa, de 5 de Outubro de 2013 a 16 de Fevereiro de 2014

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catálogo | catalogue

concepção | conception Sara Antónia Matos Manuel Rosa textos | texts Delfim Sardo Sara Antónia Matos revisão | proofreading Cristina Guerra tradução | translation Lucy Phillips, Sean Linney (Kennistranslations) design gráfico | graphic design Manuel Rosa imagem da capa | cover image Júlio Pomar, Caveira, 1959 imagens | images © Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar e Fundação Júlio Pomar textos | texts © autores | authors fotografia | photography © Luísa Ferreira / AMJP (2013) e Fundação Júlio Pomar ISBN 978-989-8618-60-3

tiragem | print run: 1000 depósito legal | legal depot : 368936/13 impressão | printing Guide – Artes Gráficas, Lda. Rua Heróis de Chaimite, 14, Odivelas

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