Vasco Araújo’s Ritornare at Galeria Francisco Fino
Memory loss leads to the erosion of our capacity for an ongoing experience, of consistency and cohesion with the elements that form our relationship with the world. A peculiar circumstance if we bear in mind that the bond we establish with the times that are virtual to us – that is, with which we interact under the condition of a time gap – is naturally fragmentary. Therefore, memory is made of images whose frontiers are not always clear, and it will be impossible to conceive of these mnesic glimpses in isolation, with each timeline focusing on the edge of another window, another body, other ways of belonging here or there: thereby protecting the fiction generated – the self and the other that builds us up – about who we are. In an opposite sphere to the clinical, naturally vested in the common well-being through a therapeutic approach to the illness process, we may think of the creative power represented by forgetfulness. To forget in order to create, to forget so as to move forward. Obviously, dementia, where the patient is in a state of mental confusion, especially as a result of the failure to remember, represents a stage of alienation, from which the infirm subject can only establish a relationship with others that is at best arbitrary, since it is not possible, as a result of plastic-affective indifference, to use reality as raw material for the development of other landscapes.
Ritornare, Vasco Araújo’s exhibition, paradoxically revives oblivion, not as a failure, but as an interlude of artistic power. Ritornare is perhaps first and foremost, more than anything else, someone gazing in the mirror. A face is split or doubled. To make things easier, we say a mask or a persona, but, after all, we are below or beyond the dichotomous understanding of truth and lies. A mask and a face. A face that is a mask when it reaches us. But what face is it? Of someone returning? Someone reaching into the past? Someone who lingers in a present that is stirred up precisely by that glance over the shoulder? Shouldn’t the definition of this identity require probing our own? Is it to find out where we are looking at someone from so that recognition can occur?
The artist offers us an exhibition which is both an evocation and a denial, a welcoming gesture and a farewell, and its ceremonial aspect, clearly visible in the ritual that the viewer goes through to reach the artist’s split figure on the screen in the last room, has the ghostly-magical character that celebrations always elude. It is worth noting that the most up-to-date – and moving – version of the artist, to which we are given access after retrieving a series of old photographs of him, is shown on a screen where he seems to be answering questions posed by a voice-over. The current figure – always an approximation of the present and consequently a fiction of the present – is surrounded by his image from years ago, singing in mute. His form has changed substantially. With one guise or another, the artist presents himself in a spectacular apparatus, while at the same time constantly investigating who he is and what defines him. We continually are, we continually mask ourselves. Only a selective, provisional, ephemeral and insufficient glance – in other words, one fraught with memory – can see the porosity between the self and the other, which lays the foundation for the unfolding of a masking process that is ultimately the clearest way of registering an identity. The question must be asked: what sort of metamorphosis are we unaware of at the moment we see the exhibition, and which we will later clearly see as the taking off of one garment to put on another?
The artist’s photographs as a young adult (four in all) – but the seriousness of the make-up on the face of a man with almost childish, or distinctly feminine features, blurs the ages – are exhibited as an archive to be worked on, thereby appearing duly grounded on fragments of a thought about the abundance that each personality presents, without ever containing it, and of which the mask will be an approximation as frank as it is residual, provisional. The face photograph, the artist’s ghostly salute to himself – he was surely the first viewer of the exhibition at the time of its conception -, a concrete document of the past, a relic, one might say, nonetheless does not contrast with the singing excerpt, in the voice of Maria Callas, that we hear over and over again. The sureness and reliability of memory supports – going as far as the traditional and now anachronistic tape recorder – are contradicted in favour of a journey that must be made under the assumption of a new beginning. Callas’ voice’s immateriality, the short duration of the musical excerpt sung, generate in us the impression of belonging to a world apart from the one that locates the Galeria Francisco Fino in the city of Lisbon, apart from the time we entered that space, unrelated to the agenda we had planned for the day. The repetitive nature of the voice, combined with the unseen image-enhancer that the music brings into play – the repetitive punctuality of a line from Puccini’s opera Tosca – dislodges us from the continuum of normative, consensual temporality to present us with a new world, subject to the imagined pods that will make up the architecture of the same place. And Callas is as much about Araújo as it is about us, because it acts as a compositional element and dwelling – a skin – for an alternative world, to the exact degree that it is already a memory – life – in full fruitful development.
On the one hand, the movement is one of return, Ritornare…, and a serial enticement proper to the archiving exercise lies behind the elements of this exhibition: for example, the eight-metre long charriot with different costumes cutting through the room in a symbolic proposal of the psychic split between the creator and the receiver. It is deliberately unclear who archives and what is archived. The evidence and vertigo remaining is the confirmation that what is stored, catalogued and described is also archival material, reflecting the efficacy of a language and certain structuring grammars, as well as pointing out the impossibility of fixing time and any identity unit under the sign and pretension of truth. Furthermore, it is important to remember that remembering is a matter of selection and, in fact, of successive and more or less conscious acts of excluding, in other words, forgetting. Memory as a creative platform and relational ground is also forgetfulness, a lapse, a gap, a break: just like any framework that serves as a vantage point and starting point.
Consider Jorge Luis Borges’ character Funes, a person tormented by a complete memory: capable of grasping every detail, yet incapable of any form of thought: ’He [Funes] had learnt English, French, Portuguese and Latin without effort. I suspect, however, that he was not much capable of thinking. To think is to forget differences, to generalise, to abstract. In Funes‘ cluttered world, there were only almost immediate details’. Indeed, we could think of Vasco Araújo, in Ritornare – here in the opposite direction to ritornello, due to the impossibility of symmetry and homology – as Funes’ biographer who, after a week’s work, alienated by the routine and the transits of an apparently banal life – as they all are in some way – decides to look at his image in the mirror and, for a moment, realises that every crease in his body is the counterpart of what he has lost. And, of course, he finds himself writing yet another short story. After all, life is astonishing, worthy of a record and all the wedding marches. Perhaps it will make a good memoir. Of Vasco Araújo or of each one of us.
The truly delightful feature of Ritornare is that the more unique the artist appears – we could talk about creating a diva character -, the more human he becomes, requiring the perfect combination of a thinker’s clarity of ideas and a craftsman’s resourcefulness and skill. The star is the one we can see.
Vasco Araújo’s Ritornare is at Galeria Francisco Fino in Lisbon until November 16.