Treading carefully
Ricardo Resende
The title "Tudo pelas beiradas" (treading carefully) is also the condition when writing a text for an artist’s first solo show, it’s a privilege and at the same time a great challenge. In texts of this nature we must tread carefully, because it’s up to the exhibition’s curator and even to an art critic to point out the artist’s talent.
It’s a big risk when there isn’t a history of the work yet. However, this is not David Magila’s case, exhibiting for the first time in a solo show his paintings and drawings, at Galeria Contempo, in São Paulo, David Magila has been an artist for some years.
Magila is from São Caetano do Sul, a city that is part of the São Paulo’s Metropolitan Region, and graduated in Visual Arts from the Universidade Estadual de São Paulo, in 2003. He participated in other activities not directly related to Art until 2012. Our first contact took place when he was awarded the "Edital de Exposições", from Ribeirão Preto Art Museum, when I was one of the jurors of this contest. At that time, I had the opportunity to see his production for the first time. This award was a turning point for the artist, which made him chose to dedicate himself exclusively to Art. Before college, David Magila attended the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios where he learned the artistic practices. It’s not by chance that he can draw. He makes figurative drawings with firm lines on paper sheets and notebooks. These drawings are painted or kept in graffiti. When they are not on paper they appear as sketches on the canvases, where they end up remaining visible under the thin layer of paint of his paintings.
Actually, for the artist the drawings structure his work and because of it, stronger than painting, they stand out. The drawings are not invented, they are observation drawings, according to what he commented about his creative process. The images painted are photographic registers or simply sketches, to be painted later. They are strange views. In some of them, it takes time to understand what is painted. Captured images of places that were something but aren’t anymore. Their existence as space or place doesn’t make sense. Places that have already had some function and now there are only some remains of their use and functions. The views’ perspectives are also strange, distorted and from unusual situations that remained and don’t even make sense.
This is his painted repertoire – views of chance, corners that aren’t noted in a quick glance of the cities, details of a useless architecture, subtleties of a landscape detail like a puddle or a pier over a lake that blends in the landscape. The mirroring of water is perfect in the artist’s thick brushstrokes. In other canvases we see situations like the Bar Peixada that is in a deserted beach, with a shadow that reminds us of those views in the metaphysical painting by the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. A view of a fenced pool that has an abstracted landscape in the background. Tiled floors emerge. Among the canvases presented in this exhibition, I would highlight the painting composed by colorful umbrellas. A vibrant image of warm colors. Lots of light compose this painting. The background seen is the green of the trees and the blue of the sky that emerges curdled with brushstrokes and leakages that represent the clouds.
Finally, another painting, what we see is a facade "without architecture" where a water tank is in the foreground. It’s a view of the poor "architecture" that predominates in Brazilian cities, covered with the infamous asbestos roof tiles. Even the brand of the water tank is visible helping to compose the picture of desolation.
Magila paints a real city. His paintings don’t need to be justified with artistic theory or through Art history or even through a logic about the technique of the painting itself. It’s only necessary to see them to realize their pictorial qualities and the subjectiveness printed in the images painted.
David Magila’s art work and painting are a quest that reflects our need to try to organized the chaos, observed, for example in the big cities. Magila tells us that when he "goes out" he always takes with him a camera and a notebook.
The artist observes the details of the architecture, the streets, the constructions, the chaos that surrounds us. He does that with poetry, by taking these images to his canvases.
Focusing on the details, in the small things, the artist is seeking nothing more than ordering the world. Utopian, no doubt. But that’s how he expresses himself, transforming and materializing this look in paintings, drawings and engravings. Works of rare beauty when compared to the rest of the contemporary art production.
I quote here the journalist and artist Carlos Uchôa, in one of his texts from 1994, about the painting of the artist Luiz Sôlha. "I took a breath when I entered the studio" when I came across David Magila’s works. One cannot be inert or leave unscathed in face of his canvases and drawings. Uchôa, in the same text, asked himself what was the role of painting at that time? He wrote as a conclusion: "exiguous".
Today I wouldn’t say the same. On the contrary, painting has been potent through the hands and brushstrokes of many young artists, such as David Magila. It has been one of the most popular practices and still desired by curators and institutions to have works of this quality. His painting, in the words of Magila himself, is nothing more than a mere "colorful drawing". But what a drawing!