The exhibition EXPERIMENTO COLETIVO: CONFLUÊNCIA urges us to completely revisit painting at its most proto-modern, by returning to the illusory resources of representation, or the use of volumes and shadows, whilst simultaneously remaining modern, through the vertiginous handling of colour, with broad, materical and thick brushstrokes, all of which has a bearing on the concepts of art as history mentioned by Clement Greenberg, and the idea that Arthur Danto described of a Kantian and purist context for painting.

And Danto, in his description of what is modern and contemporary, further explained Greenberg’s misconception that the only way forward for art, and for painting itself, was to cut down its elements to their essence in terms of matter, deep layers of paint, the surface’s flatness, the artist’s gestures and the absence of trompe-l’oeil features. With this, modern art was boiled down to a linear, entropic historical path, lacking any possibility of other healthy contaminations, and opening up art to other realities and media.

José Gil was particularly helpful in making this significant distinction between the concept of contemporaneity in the modern period, as it existed, and contemporaneity in the present. This is a useful description to better understand the works on display in the exhibition EXPERIMENTO COLETIVO: CONFLUÊNCIA and, as an analogy, to confirm what Danto himself so clearly emphasised in his work “After the End of Art”.

This hint at contemporaneity, apparent in the exhibition, makes it possible, under the experimental and learning background typical of the Coletivo Amarelo itself, to rightfully reveal a contemporaneity confined not just to one time, but to several times and several eras. This is what this exhibition is all about. Contemporaneity not in the realm of what is created in the present time, and in the present era, standing on an equal footing with the others, but a sort of contemporaneity able to bring together different artistic genres, some urban pop (which blend together), bringing them together in the same place and time. As Danto would say, it is as if artists could visit museums, take important and distinct sections of art history and then place them alongside each other in their own artistic work. With no major restrictions on adopting the art values of the past, and without the obligation to exhaustively explain their options, or even justify them to an audience, to critics, or to the modernism bogeyman, in which one must always display new work, and break with the past. (Not to mention that everyday life and the tangible environment of the streets are also where artists gather their elements, closer to their lives and their cultural references).

Danto is thus crucial in reinforcing this notion of contemporaneity, which is so well depicted in this exhibition.

Modern art thrived on the idea of a collective, composed of its contemporaries, labouring for a common goal of breaking with the past and aiming for a future in which artistic fields pursued consensus, originality and essentiality. Rejecting even the functionalism of past times and what these could have to offer for art’s continuity. On the other hand, contemporary art, within the realms of the present, extols the multiple stages that art has lived through and brings them back to the current time. Artists use them to better match their intentions and ways of communicating. The exhibition thereby coexists with different times and ways of making paintings. The visitor’s perspective is prompted to revisit different moments in the history of painting or resist its end. Or even the overcoming of an idea that painting has reached the end of its quest to provide continuity to the history of art.

We have now works, such as those by Gianlluca Carneiro in the exhibition, featuring a contemporaneity that emphasises heterogeneity and multiple references, shifting between different ways (and resources) of operating and resorting to representation without any taboos, and without jeopardising the commitment to innovation in art and its role in the future, under the present-day definition of art history.

Gianlluca Carneiro’s figures, sometimes caricatured, sometimes shapeshifted, in broad, slimy brushstrokes, generally narrate current affairs, issues that he lives with on a daily basis, matters that are not foreign to a society and a generation like his own. Carneiro addresses political and social issues while simultaneously not compromising his own pictorial pursuit and experimentalism. He seems to be unrestrainedly exorcising his tiny monsters, as Danto said when he spoke of Greenberg’s rejection of surrealism.

Among the artists represented, a certain kinship also seems to emerge with the 1980s post-modern painting, with the likes of Bazelitz, David Salle, Harring, or other art forms such as Kruger, Levine or Mapplethorpe. For instance, the artist Michael SaintClaire, featured in Coletivo Amarelo’s current exhibition, has already seen his vibrantly coloured works displayed at the Soho Contemporary Art gallery.

Meanwhile, Osias André harnesses the body as an exchange and tension agent, hinting at the power of intimacy and communion. However, this convergence may not be truly achieved. The viewer is free to fulfil their daydreams. It also calls forth, in a state of ambivalence, an almost abstract landscape in which languid bodies also merge, intertwine and stir, implying anonymous deeds. It reinforces the idea of the body as an immolation, a bearer of abuse, a game of power, subordination and exploitation, and where perhaps underprivileged peoples appear to suffer silently, their dignity and basic needs suppressed.

The exhibition EXPERIMENTO COLETIVO: CONFLUÊNCIA, curated by Cristiana Tejo, is on show in Marvila until August 26.