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Luís Fortunato Lima
Luís Fortunato Lima is a painter based in Porto. Bruno Borges is a painter based in Lisbon.
Bruno Borges, Blue and White, 2007. Oil on canvas, 15 x 16 in. Courtesy of the artist.According to Joaquim Vieiras, with whom I agree, artists are people who produce images without being asked by anyone to do it. However, these images are made to be seen by others. For whatever reasons painters produce images—which implacably vary—this activity always demands the answer to at least one question: “What to paint?” (at least in the context of figurative painting.) This question has already been exhaustively formulated by Richter, as has another one: “How to paint?” In fact, this has been an object of recurrent resistance in contemporary art. Due to a lack of subject matter in painting, or interest in it, or by force of the torrent of images which we insist on pouring into the world, we talk of the lack of the pertinence of images in painting, and even the lack of pertinence of their existence … from the depths there echoes a voice saying. “… after all (!), wasn’t [painting] dead?”
Bruno Borges—“in his modesty”—states these questions on (another) level, a more simple one, and one that I think is far from those nuisances of “life or death at the crest of art.” Painting is something simpler, and more joyful. We shouldn’t think about the death of painting, just as in life we shouldn’t dwell too much on its end. Death is present and the thought of it depresses those who paint, just as it depresses those who live. Painting is not life, nor can it overlap life, but rather, it reflects life. The sense of both depends mostly—not to say exclusively–on conviction.
Bruno Borges solves the first questions of painting in a simple and assumed way. As he himself says about his daily routine—“I go on looking at the signals, at the prefabs of construction, at the shadows that fall on the walls and the floors of the city, which keep changing and give me a sign of time—I go on working… step by step… I create other pictures with objects I find here and there.”
There is in him an expectant side, not without a certain resignation. There is no illusion either—not even an attempt—in his multiplicity of senses. His modesty (in the best sense) bounces against the title he gave his recent exhibition, one of the most humble genres in painting in the history of art—Still Life. Despite the apparent simplicity of this pictorial form, addressed by practically all those considered big in painting (with a special reference to Morandi,) it is something very deep and to whose meaning only few accede.
In painting the feelings of the world pulsate. Here, vision is commended and privileged. In the sense referred to by Merleau-Ponty, the eye is the vehicle of the spirit, more than a window on the world. It is not the latter that searches and invades us—passivity doesn’t exist. We are active: the world doesn’t present itself; we search for it and construct it. This means the images we create of the visible world, as we can verify through history, are the things that define the intellect, the human spirit, its capacities and psychological maturations, rather than its exterior reality. Painting is a concrete reality, with a process of construction (and a history) of its own. It is an object where the painter touches the visible by the action of the spirit, where a series of things gain sense and meaning. Such things are not meant be seen—but rather are thought, felt, recalled, and intuited from the world and from ourselves. For these reasons painting is, according to my conviction and in the words of Lucian Freud, something that “doesn’t just remind us of life, but gains a life of its own.” According to this line of thought, in painting one deals with self-knowledge through the act of making.
Sensing the world is something we learn consciously and unconsciously, by means of our daily life and its demands. The painter’s need to construct images, to transform a sensory reality into another one is absolutely distinct. The painter dedicates or applies himself to the observation of the world by being particularly concerned with phenomena such as light, shadow, color, and matter, not being able to forget (even if he wants to) all that he has learned. He is framed in an effective cultural and aesthetic posture. The image of the world is no longer a small postcard lodged in his interior. In fact painting isn’t an optical transposition, nor a transfer of thought–and in Bruno Borges’ case–doesn’t intend to be. Referents are purified, emphasizing the minimum and basic elements that make possible the installation of perception or recognition. A vague memory is constructed by the representation of volume (light/shadow,) and the proper perspective distortions and colors are made–an incomplete, but fair perception. The referent is just a referent, from which we cannot hope to obtain more revealing observations or second readings. It becomes, if we want it to, a motive to make painting, a formal will of the produced image. As Ponty states, “there’s no recipe for the visible.” In the same way, there’s no pictorial recipe for the sensation of the world. There is, in Borges’ hand, a certain perfectionism that owes a reference not to an idealized image or to a certain type of painting, but that concerns a kind of creative process that attests to the artistic values characteristic in painting. By exploiting the gesture that a brushstroke makes, in the way a mark insists on letting the raw canvas be seen, some of the transparences or opacities are emphasized by the body of the carefully prepared paint, by the composition, and harmony/dissonance of the colors.
From the texts I have read concerning exhibitions by Bruno Borges, I found some keywords that we can apply to his personality. The purified look of his images also relates to him as a person; the simplicity of his subjects demonstrates his unpretentious personality, his pushing aside of spectacular or virtuous trends, and searching for more essential and sensitive qualities. His painting presents us with the fairness of the daily life of his activity as a painter, as it does my own, which I demystify by calling it trivial. The word silence echoes with far more psychological density and, as they say, installs itself in his images. Well, maybe because that’s what a day’s work is made of.
