I access Ana Silva exhibition Colecção Primavera-Verão on display at Culturgest, in Lisbon.

At first, I am enraptured by the simple, metallic colours that cover high tubular structures and rise in space, punctuating the gallery. The slender span of the structures makes me aware of the configuration of the space. Ceiling, walls, and technical architectural details also appear to resonate and call my attention[1].

The lacquered paintings, which fill the high-density PVC surfaces, awakens me, for a moment, to the colour contrasts, to the shine caused by the light reflected on those same paints, and to the metal clamps that unite the different constituent parts.

I remember the artists who, at the end of the 20th century, covered their sculptural works with silver and also those who resorted to the miscegenation of the various artistic disciplines. I remember painting, sculpture, and the importance of applying colour to the surface of three-dimensional works in the classical domains of art. In the past (colour) was seen as a subsidiary attribute of the work, decorative or representative, and not valued, as it was later, as an exclusive autonomous element of the essentiality of painting – in the terms referred to by the most purists and by Clement Greenberg.

But it was mainly on the chrome clamps, in addition to the pleasant and contrasting impression of the colour, that my gaze stopped intrigued, and that caused me a certain fascination, which has never left me.

I tried to remember what reasons would lead me to dedicate so much of my time to thinking about the reasons for the enchantment that caused such sparkles in me, but it took me a while to find an answer. At least a plausible one for me.

Johannes Itten, in his theories on colour, clarified that, for the artist, the effects caused by colour, resided above all in the observer, and that the secrets of colour remained hidden, and often invisible, to our eyes. It was precisely these secrets that brought me to a state of perplexity in the face of the small sparkles that I noticed in the technical details visible in the sculptures, and which nevertheless held my attention so much.

This guilt, due to an ingrained enchantment that I could not understand, was dissipated precisely at the moment when I decided to read Itten again and realized his liberating and enlightening words regarding the mastery of colour and the choice that artists made of it. Now, for Itten, it can precisely be an artist intuitive choice, or, in other words, an intense work of research, on a thorough and scientific process of knowledge of its properties.

Colour is life, as Itten would have said. “Just as a flame generates light, light generates colours. Colours are children of light and light is their mother. Light, that first phenomenon in the world, reveals to us the spirit and living soul of this world through colours”.

And so, I continue, and I stop, inebriated by the colour and brightness of Ana Santos’ works. I continue to ask, in an attempt to understand the resonances that his phantasmagoria provoke in me, and even their hypothetical analogies.

I wander my gaze into the history of art, and above all I scrutinize in memory, the works of the past where I may have felt precisely the same rapture that I experienced when admiring the effulgence caused by the technical elements in Ana Santos’ pieces.

It comes to mind, of course, the rectilinear and industrially well-finished treatment of the minimalist and essentialist works of the last century. But also, and more remotely, the influence effect of older works, and in what could then be taken as a true lesson in painting. And it was precisely in painting that I found these resonances, these reverberations, this consolation. – I recall Tintoretto’s wide brushstrokes, highlighting details of light and mysticism, – I recall the strong rays of light cast by Caravaggio on the illuminated faces of the characters shrouded in darkness, – I emphasize the artist’s taste for detail, in Basket of Fruits, 1598, in the work Head of Medusa, 1597, or even in Sick Baco, especially the care, in this last work, in the application of glitter on the surface of the small painted grape berries. Offering himself to me as a gift, we could observe the work of art of Diego Velázquez and on the dazzling impression that the artist molded on the hair, face and dress of the various infantas Margaridas, who he represented so much on canvas. Rigid and tense figures, whose gaze leans over us, but always in a vague and abstract, yet disturbing way. This look that does not leave the viewer out, but which impels him to reside in the work.

I could go on more examples; The light that can be seen in other works by Velázquez, such as Venus at her mirror (1948), which distinguishes itself in the modelling of sparkles in the radiant wings of the angel, who supports the mirror where Venus is comfortably seen; or the portrait of Pope Innocent X (1630), later interpreted by Francis Bacon, who surrounded the papal figure with paths of gleaming ink and snaking light.

The exhibition by Ana Santos, seems to be, suggested by the title Colecção Primavera – Verão, precisely a costume parade. There are cable ties, which could more evoke chokers or necklaces made of precious metals and stones. We are compelled to look up. These haughty figures suggest other levels, perhaps places where higher spirits dwell. The anthropomorphic and aristocratic poses are linked, who knows, to the ostentation and narcissism of other times. There where there was room for certainties, perfection of beings was aspired, and man was the centre of things.

It is precisely in the “maturation of my vision”[2], and “through things”[3], as an “operation of thought”[4], that I will seek, through what is given to me to see, “my interiority”[5], my allusions to other times in which I was carried away, by other works, or precisely by the painting of yesteryear, by the same sensations of brilliance and perplexity.

We are simultaneously “seers and visible”, Merleau-Ponty tells us. “Visible and mobile, my body belongs to the number of things, it is one of them, it is trapped in the texture of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing”[6].

I look at the sculptures by Ana Santos, and I realize the immersive state I find myself in. I participate in them, as my body, standing, integrated into the same space they inhabit, emphasizing its verticality. I realise, like them, that I am more of a body, reflected in their surfaces, and that, while looking at them, and looking at myself, I find myself looking at the mirror, simultaneously.

The Colecção Primavera-Verão exhibition by Ana Santos delights us with its forms covered by colours, sometimes cold, sometimes warm, sometimes delicate, other times more intense. Pieces appear covered with garments formed by threads that fall in one piece, alike parallel lines to the ground. The drawing is intuited, even if in a hidden and somewhat withdrawn way. The artist’s works reflect extreme care in surface finishes, with an intention of aesthetic quality[7], which moves away from, and almost opposes, the models previously applied by the artist, and manifested in past exhibitions, evoking a certain “de-aestheticization”[8], idea elaborated, at a certain point, by Harold Rosenberg[9] . The work present in the current exhibition, which comes closest to this conception, and which links the artist to this way of doing things in the past, is the work Sem Título, from 2015. Consisting of found objects, it is comprised of metal boxes, already crushed, without the delicate treatment of the other pieces present in the exhibition. This work, “Untitled” is the last one in the exhibition trajectory, and its disordered form is only softened by means of a mantle that covers it, made of threads that fall, vertically, towards the ground.

Colecção Primavera-Verão by Ana Santos is on show at Culturgest until 10 September.

[1] Pieces that reflect the lighting of the gallery, its elements, and the shadows themselves.

[2] Merleau-Ponty (2018) “The eye and the spirit”. Nova Veja, 10th edition, p. 20 to 23.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] By covering the PVC pipes with lacquer, she gave them aesthetic qualities.

[8] The term “Deaestheticization”, and the author Harold Rosenberg, were mentioned by Bruno Marchand, in the catalog of the exhibition “Corpos Imanentes”, shown in the space for the dissemination of contemporary art Chiado 8 – Arte Contemporânea, between 20.01 and 30.03.2012.

[9] Idem