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A world stretching out of sight - Guignard
This exhibition assembles paintings and drawings by Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896-1962) produced between 1929 – when the artist returned definitively to Brazil after a period of more than two decades in Europe – and 1961, one year before his death – to form a broad overview of his career. The selection favours works produced after 1950, in an attempt to emphasise the process of partial dissolution of the spaces and objects frequently represented in the painter’s work. It accompanies the gradual rarification and dilution of the paint substance in constructing landscapes seen distantly from on high and transformed into small-scale flat surfaces, in the belief that this passage of Guignard’s output is where he adopts the decisive formal solutions for consolidating the individuality of his painting within Brazilian Modernism.
If at the start of his career the artist escapes the programmatic and extravagant striving for a modern and national art in the first quarter of the 20th century, it should be remembered that subsequently, while some adherents of geometric abstraction were considering redeeming the country’s backwardness through constructivist reason, Guignard returns to the memory of a colonial and agrarian past in an agile, light, “thin” and diluted figuration. Faced with the immensity of regions now unrecognisable in time and space, the artist seems to disentangle himself from the objectivity of immediate situations to take refuge in a tone of reflection, formed of emptiness and reverie, which allows him, for example, to raise doubts about the scale, consistency and permanence of things. His elements therefore become transparent, with uncertain physical boundaries, as if about to disappear into the distance or on the brink of dissolution.
José Augusto Ribeiro
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