The insomniac is the one who cannot sleep, the one who keeps watch and does not fall into slumber. One falls asleep, but also into insomnia. An insomniac, however, is someone who has fallen without depth. A fall into the shallow surface of things. Indeed, all the things to which, during this period, one impossibly clings, as if space (but also time, perceived materially, being primarily a bodily experience) were submerged beneath a glass face deprived of all promise of friction, stripped of temperature, colour and tangibility. Fernão Cruz’s new, and to date most comprehensive, exhibition is titled exactly with the term “insone” (insomniac), starting by giving it a dubious ascription: who or what is an insomniac? In any event, it seems to raise an ethical concern: the artist who should remain awake, who should listen to the interferences their body is territorialising, non-linearly translating internal panels of affections, feelings and emotions. In effect, the artist would be the one who owes insomnia to the night – i.e., the one who is always in debt, the labourer of a constant craft, the night watchman -, who charges the day with an innovating translation of meaning and not simply a mobile, unnecessarily rotating one.

There are 21 paintings in the centre of Galeria Cristina Guerra, where Órfão, a unique sculpture of an ashen man, a 3D-printed rendition of the artist’s body, takes the surrounding group of paintings back to the time and ritualistic layout of a wake. But this is a wake in which the paintings are positioned vertically around the body, rather than in a pious and limited expression of a body prepared for farewell, in that kind of presence which is both indifferent and overt, that is, both natural and dramatic, of landscapes which, faced with death and destruction, are sustained against it. In other words, hidden is an organising centre, a space-time fold focusing the empty point that activates meaning. Someone has said it: the centre is an invention and, from there, a beginning. Precisely, this landscape arrangement of the works, conferring on them a dialoguing dynamic – as if one were the adventurous layer or mirror of the other – allows the centre to be the creative motif that does not besiege the paintings’ caustic abstraction with any narrative attempt. In a piece on self-portraiture published in the catalogue of the exhibition Je Est Un Autre, at Galeria Cómicos and Serralves, Pedro Miguel Frade writes something that seems aptly suited to Fernão Cruz’s work, viewing this exhibition as an unusual way of developing the self-portrait motif, by building an amphitheatre of more or less dissimilar and harmonious impressions: “Contemporary self-representation combines the relative solitude of the individual as a receiver of messages and images in post-industrial society with the fact that, in that solitude, he is not alone but connected to others by transversal traits, so uncertain as immaterial: but, for that matter, it is also much less selfish than modern self-portrait, in the sense that it allows much more for the trans-subjective play of interpretation as mediated rediscovery of culture“^[1].

One could say that the gesture of INSONE is tied to bringing a body onto the stage, the artist’s body, splitting both the artistic self and the viewer other, who is then summoned to assemble the paintings as reflective panels. A dilemmatic groove restores the split between interior and inner as interchangeable and active ways of putting the pieces in dialogue, similar to a constellation from which we attempt to draw the differentiating point that generates additional knowledge: of the artist, of the work and of those who witness it. Since this here is about (creatively) distorting the repetition of a life course that has already happened, the illustration of the organic animating the paintings is cross-cutting, presenting these colour palettes between faded shades and the archetypal evidence of primary colours, fluctuating between the figuration of square schemes (of which Prisão is an enlightening example), patterns and curved, abrupt strokes, perhaps close to surrealistic automatism (see Mosca no Olho). We should also mention the name given to the set of paintings Cérebro, pointing to the human being’s elementary vital organ, establishing a symmetry between the exhibition and a showroom or laboratory of bodies, limbs, tissues, viscera, all of which are combined and recombined, perpetually testing surrealist – as opposed to economic, minimalist – aesthetic and material components.

In the exhibition text, Paul Lester warns of the additive nature, in crescendo, of Cruz’s work: “The creative process was additive, never subtractive; if changes were needed, more paint was added“. Interior and inner: the former refers to what is affective, the emotional colouring articulated in universally recognisable feelings through specific words, in turn materialised in different physical sensations; the latter refers to the body’s physiological side, if we agree that the right side is the one visible to the naked eye. This is how the split is structured, between what comes to light through feeling, i.e., through the language telling and generating it, whose communication entails the transgression of a primary form, as well as the invitation of the viewer to engage with the works, and that which is only glimpsed by sketching representative and codified nature models, i.e., by an essentially fictitious layout of the real.

The exhibition is kept below the narrative, in insomnia’s timelessness, and, if the ashes and the dense veins of paint acquire a tone, a temperature and a touch – visually grasped by the exhibition’s visitors -, this happens because of the surgical approach of Fernão Cruz’s work, namely the preoccupation with exhibiting, bringing the artworks to the stage for epistemological study. As such, there is no narrative, but rather an account of distinct sensitivities comparable to different emotions, anatomies and physiological states. Much like a graph visually representing an embryo forming inside a body, or a disease tracing its own geography, the canvases are a meteorological station, a map, a free association drawing faced with impossible statistics and biography. The power of the unpredictable is allied to the additive and drawn description of shapes, a bit like the so-called “body consciousness” developed by Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, uniting the artist’s body (in the centre, it should be noted) to the artwork, anticipating the blurring between which of the two bodies plays the prosthetic role: is the artwork a prosthesis, a follow-up to the artist’s arm and entire body, or the other way around? The disturbing sculpture in the centre, of an ash-covered body similar to those discovered in Pompeii, produces, like a magnet, the surrealist ductile – we should bear in mind how the surrealists acknowledged the importance of dreaming, another form of sleep interruption -, responsible for binding the surface on which the story is told to the hidden core inside, whose impenetrability coincides with the creative gesture that the artist must commit to. Concealing in order to show, painting over the painted to reach the ground.

The wake ritual is based on this role reversal: the dead body, no longer capable of receiving and understanding any light, becomes a source of light and meaning, organising a space and a set of living forms, specifically animated by the former. Seen from this metaphorical point of view, Órfão is the one who retroactively shines a light on an entire surviving lineage – the vertical canvases, usually larger than the sculpture, around them, the surrounding spectators and the artist, who is alive and recognises themselves through their own body’s inert cast. A dead orphan – as the figure in the sculpture appears to be – is also a contradiction. This, however, is the resource behind the raising of an animistic act as the operation from which, during insomnia, in that intermediate gap between sleep and consciousness, the evening or dawn of the acquired and normalised senses, a second sense is engendered. The sobriety of Fernão Cruz’s work is found in how the procedural and consummate saturation of his paintings allows the viewer (and the emerging future as an absolute present; one could speak, in this sense, of this work’s teleological significance) to imagine as a granted effort. The pieces are the exact opposite of noisy, of blatant, breaking down any decorative or excessive constraints. INSONE is a scenario that has come from far away, from the night of the world, the celebration of a birth, aware that the calendar is, as Leopardi wrote, a “beautiful and lovely illusion” that brings the shadow of a past day. Death bursts forth as extenuation, the end as an excess of life, and the birds’ nourishment is in what is always partially a parable, a flight and a nimbus of what has been. We circle the corpses like vultures, yet a light halo invites us to occasionally become swallows and spring.

The exhibition is on display at Galeria Cristina Guerra until January 20.

^[1] Catalogue of the exhibition Je Est Un Autre at Galeria Cómicos and Fundação de Serralves. (1990). Galeria Cómicos Editores: Lisbon, p. 46.