Azimuth is an angular distance horizontally measured in degrees, quadrants and clockwise, dividing the meridian of the observer’s point and the vertical circle plane that passes through the observed spot. Used in fields such as topography and cartography, the meaning of its Arabic etymological origin lends it a philosophical and poetic sense of path, direction, course. In choosing this term as the title for Pedro Vaz’s Azimuth exhibition at EMERGE’s Casa Azul, we see the double immersive experience inherent in the aesthetic journey of the artist-walker, whose working process “shifts between nature immersion through excursions and experiencing the abstract qualities that memory possesses when working in the studio”[1].

Indeed, as confirmed by him and the curators of both exhibitions that make up the project – Sérgio Fazenda Rodrigues (Galeria 111, 2018) and João Silvério (Casa Azul, ongoing) – in their curatorial writings and in the recent three-way conversation, the journey through the two rooms of the latter gallery – including the map, the suspended paintings, the landscape box and the (isolated) video Indagar – encloses (or opens up to) contrasting pairings: the scientific accuracy of the map’s coordinates and the magnetic and transcendental edge of allowing oneself to be guided, for part of the route, by sticks to find a water source; the tangible natural elements vs. the abstract qualities of the paintings that bring back memories of mountain views; the fragility of the canvases vs. the mountain’s strength; the artificial (man-made) vs. the pure and natural; but also scholarly knowledge vs. empirical knowledge, which, in this context, are coupled with a duality between the empirical experience of walking and the material objectivity of the works on display.

There is a legend in Buddhist cosmology, told by a Buddhist character in Nepal, that recalls the clockwise and quadrantal measurement of azimuth, and is a metaphor for Pedro Vaz’s artistic and natural journey across different geographies of the world, in the film The Eight Mountains – directed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, based on the book by Paolo Cognetti -, according to which the world is formed by eight mountains and eight seas, with Mount Sumeru at the centre, representing the core of all the physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes. This character asks: “Who has learnt the most? The one who has travelled over the eight mountains and the eight seas or the one who has reached the top of Mount Sumeru?”. In the film, Sumeru represents the mountain at the beginning of our story and the one we go back to after venturing into other worlds (or mountains), the one that leads to self-knowledge, identity and inner evolution and, for this reason, the most difficult to climb. Having carried out several expeditions and projects outside of Portugal, the artist-mountaineer’s choice of the Serra da Estrela, at once strong and familiar, as the protagonist of the Azimute project somehow symbolises a return home, the search for retraced paths that nevertheless always hold unexplored points, such as his own inner landscape.

Pedro Vaz’s worldview, his wandering between the city (Lisbon, where he lives and has his studio) and nature, along with a certain cultural determinism, mould his perception of the natural landscape, and relevant to this are recent developments in the philosophy of landscape and its relationship with art. Adriana Serrão notes a reversal of the classic mimetic paradigm and a shift towards the subordination of nature to art between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in a tension-filled context between the scientific revolution, along with the growth of cities, and the search for an essence connected to human nature and its origins in the natural world. The (sometimes quasi-political) flight from the city to nature begun by Romantic artists, in which this tension of the city/country relationship still included a distinctly city perspective – nature was perceived as a distant and idyllic or quaint place, rather than tangible and experiential – was pursued by the realists of the Barbizon School and, soon afterwards, by the Impressionists, who led a progressive revolution, contradicting the concept of representation applied to painting. Some of their premises are similar to the aesthetics of Pedro Vaz’s paintings, specifically the direct contact with nature and the desire to capture the impression that the landscape produces, to the exclusion of its mere reproduction. This movement and the following ones helped to emancipate nature from art, science and man.

The landscape is then considered as aesthetic nature, it is “on an experiential footing and as a form of encounter that aesthetic thought is situated.”[2] The observer then becomes a participant in natural movements, contemplating while being in it. Rosario Assunto helped to philosophically categorise the landscape, bearing in mind the measures of space and time, which make it immanently an “open finitude”, and the circularity between the (inter)subjective and the objective in symbiotic terms. Allen Carlson presents the landscape-model and the environment-model to categorise the relationship between nature and art – in the former he establishes an analogy between a stroll through the countryside and a walk in a gallery of landscape paintings, in both of which nature is seen from specific angles and distances; the latter maintains that both the aesthetic appreciation of art and that of nature require an awareness of the systems and elements specific to each. Azimute embraces the views of these authors to bring the exhibition experience closer to the walking one, with Casa Azul adapting the first room to the circular movement typical of azimuth and screening the video Indagar on the floor of the second room, almost at full scale, inviting the visitor-observer to join in the aesthetic and immersive wandering of the artist as a whole.

The exhibition route starts with a map showing the way up the mountain, alternating between the paintings-memories and the landscape box, a wooden microcosm with dull glass, recreating the veiling caused by the mountain’s atmospheric pressure and a landscape fragment, contrasting with the paintings’ large dimensions. These are based on photographs taken by the artist in Serra da Estrela, reflecting viewpoints (azimuths) at specific moments on the mountain, and more broadly mimic the contemplation and experience of and in the landscape. They are not intended to be representational; on the contrary, they speak of a (transversal or universal) understanding of the mountain and a memory of the experience of walking it. Their suspension provides a bodily reading and a synaesthetic sensation of participation. As the artist sees it, they are a result, a symbol or certificate of the journey that was made, of going to the crossable limit of the mountain, where a recent snowstorm hindered the continuation of the walk; as 80% of the project is the experience of walking and the questioning, and the other 20% is the artistic embodiment that arises from this – the works of art go beyond the gallery and envelop the mountain.

This almost performance-like exhibition route converges into a sort of simulation of the landscape experience. The water (or the search for it) that led Pedro Vaz up the mountain, whose very landscape it modifies and gave birth to the video Indagar, through which the viewer is put in the place of the artist-walker in the second room, is the same water that turned the images-memories resulting from this quest into the washing technique of the paint that had not yet dried during the process, abstracting the impression of this landscape. This act of washing seems to have a certain stripping and purification, a metaphor for accepting the unpredictability of life (and the mountain). The artist’s constantly renewed search for and encounter with the mountain, a platitude in human history, remains an open question: does the path choose us or do we choose the path we want to follow on the mountain and in the world, and within ourselves? Possibly part of the answer can be found in Henry David Thoreau’s philosophy in Walden: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.. I did not wish to live what was not life (…) nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life (…)”.

Just as Daniel Norgren repeats in one of the songs from The Eight Mountains soundtrack, “everything you know melts away like snow“. Just like the outer landscapes we live in or travel through, our inner landscapes are undergoing constant transformation. For the artist-walker Pedro Vaz, the mutation he sees (and participates in) in the former impacts and echoes in the always unfinished journey of the latter.

Azimute is at Casa Azul until May 27.

[1] Exhibition text.
[2] Serrão, Adriana. (2004). Filosofia e Paisagem. In (99+) Filosofia e Paisagem | Adriana SERRAO – Academia.edu