ABOUT THE WORK

For Lauro Müller, painting is essentially color. Nevertheless , considering the use of color as a fundamental trait of this art is not a matter limited to Müller’s work. Artists such as Matisse and Hélio Oiticica , who also focused on color, took very different routes. The experience and reflection inspired by Oiticica’s work, for example, led him to a conclusion: if color was the only permanent element of painting, it could exist without the painted canvas, i.e. outside of it. To keep it, Hélio broke off with one type of space, bidimensionality, and went on to structure it in his own real space.

However, many decades separate the works of Hélio and Lauro. And many more separate them from Matisse’s Fauvism. At present, in the case of ancestral media such as painting, once again a question that has been recurring since the 19^th century (1) crops up: what to paint for, what to paint and how to paint? A question that demands an answer considering that every contemporary painter must justify the sense and reason for his work (2), and many

Experience painting as a necessity, a reason sufficient to justify it and attribute to it a contemporary sense. It is along of these lines that we must place Lauro Müller’s work. But it is necessary to take a step back into history first.

Several of the chief representations of modernism has in common with other artists the affiliation to the same formal principles. The isms allowed them to build or tear apart the pictorial plane, separate volume from mass in sculpture as proposed by Gabo and Pevsner, and compare many other visually palpable propositions. The legitimation of the individual

Poetics starting from their connection with collective artistic projects, even if almost always limited to small groups (history) had in the isms the main threat of the meaning and eminently formal nature (spatial, chromatic, material, constructive, abstract, etc.) of modern art.

For four or five decades , the isms have been starting to move away from the formal and plastic (aesthetic) values and propose questions (ethical and political, for example) situated beyond these repertoires. Since then, the close interest for the objective nature of the form has been replaced by a growing interest in the image which, being eminently symbolic, would be incapable of allowing something comparable to the objectivity formalized in the isms. Nevertheless, the moving away from the plastic sphere has facilitated the coexistence of plurality of new technical media such as photography, cinema, and video with traditional ones, such as, for example, painting. This weakening of the plastic models has also made possible the use, according to the poetic expressions of each artist, of any material and support, especially unconventional ones.

Initially conceived as a window, since it framed the representation of the three-dimensional world in the plane (15^th century), the canvas was kept by Modernism thanks to its functional reorientation: it stopped being conceived starting from the idea of framing (in scene), to become the objective support of the invention of shapes, colors, gestures, patterns, and materials. It arrived practically intact to the contemporary world and today, still, is adopted by some because of it is natural and unique, both when we deal with images and when we think of the construction of shapes on the plane. Precisely for this reason, it has become an important problem for the immediate future of the visual arts.

Lauro Müller’s work attempts to re-evaluate the meaning of painting with a very personal method: creating color and light outside of the plane, but still within the limits of the painting (limits which are not only physical, but technical and craftsmanly). All of the artist’s recent paintings, done with cut acrylics, indicate, starting from their titles, their passage though the decisive moments of the history of the canvas and those of the paintings (which coincide with the history of painting itself over the past six hundred years): with the generic title Abstract Painting, an expression of the autonomy of the plastic element in relation to nature, Müller specifies each of his paintings with subtitles that evoke figurative situations: Gardens, Orange/Lemon, Amazonas 4, Waterfalls, Little Waterfalls, Garden 3, etc.

Lauro cuts the canvases he has already painted into strips. On a ground of a vivid color he paints large lines and curves and thus create canvases that can be taken apart by cutting. The division of the single surface of the support is not only a method of working, but also a symbolic action that seeks to meet the contemporary to redefine the historic functions (Renaissance and Modernistic) of painting and the painted canvas.

Both the Renaissance window and the Modernist curtain (cf. Clement Greenberg) have preserved the material integrity of the pictorial plane. On the other hand, Müller’s paintings destroy the plane, through the cut, but preserve the support (the painting as such), reconstructing it with the strips of the initial painting. These processes indicate to us that for Lauro the reorientation of painting comes through its expansion of the real space without, however, breaking the painting.

His works suggest an imminent fade-out. While the first stage of the work, conventionally pictorial, is the result of flat brushstrokes and refined colors, the intermediate (destruction of the pictorial gesture with the fragmentation of the cut pieces) and conclusive (assembly of the painting by combing the strips) stages produce tonal situations that are the opposite of the initial results. Like wavy rays, the strips of color great a tangle of colors and tones that interweave and hang out and down beyond the side and bottom edges of the painting.

The pictorial method invented by the artist establishes a hybrid, typically contemporary spatiality: a spatiality that constitutes, between the conventional plane of the painting and the real space, a singular work field and the semantic sphere of his poetics.

Fernando Cocchiarale                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Curator of the Museum of Modern Art (MAM)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Rio de Janeiro

Notes:

1) Here is a matter of the theme of death in painting, which has recurred frequently since the 19^th century.

2) A question different that posed by Clement Greenberg, who tried to show that the sense and reason for modernist painting lay in self-criticism; i.e., painting had to justify with its own means that the experience depicted was not replaceable with any other. Its disappearance would have entailed the irreversible cultural loss of this experience.

Lauro Müller cannot be associated with a group or a generation. He is an individualist by nature and conducts his artistic career as an extension of his personality. His work is an expression of an interior process that prioritizes sensitive reflection articulated with formal conceptualization.

“I seek to give form and movement to the colors, trespassing the limits of traditional painting, using only paint and canvas. My goal is to renovate abstract painting, reinvent it.”

“The artist’s main responsibility is to create new worlds, a field of human expression though his art, pushing boundaries, knocking down limits. I take this literally, my colors break free from the canvas and the forms meet their own space.”

CONTACT