Silence
Installation views. Photos courtesy Galeria Vera Cortês.
Galeria Vera Cortês +info
For this exhibition, Bunga is addressing something closer to painting. Some of these paintings are packaged in shallow wooden or cardboard boxes, others are applied onto fabrics; the boxes have quadrangular areas, reticulated or arranged in ways similar to house plans, although at least two of them are dead ends, concise labyrinths and, moreover, closed like prison cells.
These fields – let’s call them that too, their experimental nature deters more conventional designations – are as murky as building sites; the paints are handled in multiple ways: watery and applied with broad, energetic, one might say inarticulate gestures; thick, lumpy, worked with some instrument until they take on the appearance of meticulous renderings, or explored in a more informal solution – directly, with bare hands. This can be inferred by their convulsed topographies, by the traces left behind. There are also those left to dry on their own, without further treatment, which causes them to shrink and crack, and those applied to fabrics, all of them simple, perhaps dejected, crumpled and torn, layers of rags dyed black. Black like the whole set of works on display.
This is the first time that Carlos Bunga used the color black. Following on with the poem from the epigraph of Fear, published by Carlos Drummond de Andrade in 1945, one of the ephemera of horror: “Our existences are few: / Postman, dictator, soldier / And we were brought up to fear / We smell flowers of fear / Of fear, red rivers / we wade”.
For this exhibition, Bunga wrote:
“It’s important to talk seriously about the moment I decided to make this work because it’s a stop along the way, a pause… a realization, a reflection out loud… for everything I’ve experienced in the last year… the art world: Documenta in Kassel (open letter from the curators)… the Venice Biennale (my candidature for the Portuguese pavilion in Venice), the wars, the refugee and migrant crisis, the class struggle, the lack of political values and social action, the lack of ‘self-criticism’, hate speech and racism, among many other diagnoses present in the society we live in…
They are works that show the unease we feel about self-censorship for fear of retaliation when we express an opinion.
Martin Luther King said “our lives begin to end the day we remain silent about the things that matter”. Gandhi said “The most atrocious of bad things about people is the silence of good people”. Unamuno said “Sometimes silence is the worst lie”.
Some cultures may find silence uncomfortable, others consider it part of the conversation. Sometimes silence can be considered nothing, empty works, but nowadays and in our culture, the concept is full of tension, discomfort, restlessness… somehow we feel that words have been stolen from us, that they are empty of meaning and we choose silence, but it’s not a silence of peace, it’s a full, intense silence, full of words.
In Asian cultures, silence denotes deep reflection and in these cultures what is not said can be just as important, if not more important, than what is said. It’s a space to meditate, to think more deeply, to withdraw, to concentrate… But this silence is different, it’s not a silence that makes us more relaxed or calm but quite the opposite, it’s a state of alertness, it’s full of discomfort… We spend a lot of time listening to what people say and rarely pay attention to what they don’t say. Silence is also a residue of fear. Silence is part of language, we can’t leave it out, it’s an intrinsic part and it’s found in that interstice, in the middle, between the word and the unspeakable or the unnameable. It is somehow a frontier. To approach it is also to find, on its part, the word, the text, what is not said…
It’s a black silence, full of colours, ideas, content…
Using black as Reinhart or Tàpies did was more of a maximum reduction, a schematisation. Reinhart said that he tried to create a ‘pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, unchanging, euphoria-free and disinterested painting and object that is self-conscious, ideal, transcendent, conscious of nothing but art’. I think your paintings come from the abstract, the black in your case goes towards life, today’s society, the ashes of vanished cities, silenced or self-censored voices.
The fusion between domestic objects such as blankets, sheets, fabric cut-outs and studio materials such as latex or photography, passing through the works best known as attempts at conservation or pictorial constructions. Black/silence colours everything. Noise predominates in our society, but not only externally, but also internally.
It’s a dark time for humanity, between wars, power lobbies… Culture of silence or conspiracy of silence…”
WORKS
Left. Silencio #18. Skin, 2024. Latex paint on fabric. 280 x 90 cm.
Left. Silencio #41. Pictorical Construction. Nature, 2024. Latex paint, glue and leaves on wood. 200 x 160 cm. Center. Silencio #17, 2024. Latex paint on fabric. 125 x 95 cm. Right. Silencio #33, 2024. Latex paint on fabric. 182 x 156 cm.
Top left. Silencio #4. Rug, 2024. Latex paint and glue on rug. 16 x 43 x 34 cm. Top right. Silencio #39. Skin, 2024 . Latex. 37 x 33 cm. Bottom left. Silencio #14. Skin, 2024. Latex paint on fabric. 40 x 40 cm. Bottom right. Silencio #24. Composition, 2024. Latex paint and glue on cardboard. 25 x 2 x 4 cm.
2024. Lisboa, Portugal.
