The 7 seas of painting

 

“A strange image and strange prisoners”

Platão. The Republic. Book VII

 

 

When Édouard Manet visited Rio de Janeiro in 1849, no one could imagine that art would invent so many tendencies and movements, dividing figurative reality and abstraction; that the world would communicate in real time and that painting would be the starting point for photography, film, video and the world's computer networks. And that, exactly 170 years later, in the same city, we would be rediscussing painting through an artist for whom territorial boundaries no longer exist. This is the case of Walter Tada Nomura - Tinho, and the 7 Seas (Sete Mares) at Paço Imperial.

 

From Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" (380 BC) to the principle of the darkroom (1554), the inventions of book (Pi Sheng in 1405 and Gutemberg in 1455),  lithograph (1796),  photography (by Angelo Sala to Joseph Niépce, between 1604 and 1826), until Hercules Florence, a Frenchman living in Brazil, coined the term “photographie”, when we arrived at the cinema (from Thomas Edison's kinescope to the Lumière brothers' cinematograph, 1891 to 1895) and finally to the world`s computer network - Internet - around 1980.

 

Among light, electricity and telepathy, we have left behind the time of the slow communications to speak in real time among 8.7 billion people on the planet. Among all the inventions, the statement of the psychologist Hugo Mustemberg, one of the first film theorists, already denied, in 1916, the possibility of the effect of the movement produced in the cinema resulting from retinal phenomena. Mustemberg believed that everything happened in the neural phase of the process of visual perception. Mustemberg's belief was correct. It is about this perception extended to the collective mode of neural processes that Tinho's 7 Seas speak. A biodynamic tissue links real space to collective neural networks, from individual to individual, directly through common anthropological relationships. It links who read, saw, listened, noticed, dressed, experienced and traveled the spaces of life through a certain culture and its objects, which today are being replaced by digital networks, such as books and skateboards that contain a philosophy of mobility apart.

 

The one who sees Tinho`s paintings activates his own memory of what he sees, extends in the immediate world the celebration of a universe of material culture and customs that integrate several generations. And that, seen as he painted, recreate the power of these cultural memories in the present. Tinho's paintings are, at the same time, the description and the life of time and space and relationships, the boundary between cultures and media - for example, book and literature, records and sound. These are works that elevate seeing to the state of meaning and consciousness.

 

It could not be expected less from an artist who, besides mastering painting in both realistic and abstract terms, has the experience of the street, the syntactic and symbolic mastery of the universe of art and graffiti as the real circulation of contemporary culture and its objects beyond immateriality in various cities of the world. Phenomena of the global nation, which mirror, in the digital minute, millions of years of life of the real and topological space.

 

Seeing Tinho's painting is taking the painting outside the painting, as if there was no separation between art and reality. Tinho simply came to the place of the work in which art is life and life is work, without distinguishing what he saw from what we see. Seeing his work is discovering the eighth sea, it is realizing what binds us in the face of everything he has realized, creating a unique, rare and singular series of recent painting in which we are - him as an artist and us as a living part of his

 work - breaking the mere spectatoriality.

 

Augmented reality inside and outide simultaneously. The view of a current artist, who does not separate natural and abstract reality, and makes it possible to say that we have reached the foundations of 21st century painting in search of interactive and anthropological landscapes.

 

While leaving the twentieth century behind, this new art, derived directly from urban passages, broadens our cognitive chances in the real world, where painting functions as a “meeting place,” contrasting digital networks with their characteristic of abstract reality.  Light, and not a shadow of our own existence, this exhibition has the singular and transgressive character of the horizon line found by Manet, a horizon often transcended by Street Art, which, as seen through Tinho's works, made painting rediscover itself,  as we navigate our gaze on the composition of the 7 Seas. Gens trouvé beyond the objet trouvé. Art found beyond art. Art without conceptual, imaginary and dialogical boundaries. A similar image and similar fellow men.

 

Saulo di Tarso

curator