Sergio Fingermann - Sonia Salzstein (1995) - English Version
Even while demonstrating a relatively moderate inclination for public appearances, Sérgio Fingermann’s work has been developing at a constant and intense rate since the end of the 70’s. In any case, the fact that his work betrays a certain timidity in declaring itself ready, suggests that the contemporary overshadowing of the individual scale of the workshop and the corollary practices and traditions of painting appear as a central question in the work. This question, by the way, seems to locate the artist somewhere between hesitance and confidence in view of painting’s possibilities.
After all, the problems which result, related basically to the viability of painting concerned with representation and image, are indicative of an uncertain terrain haunted by the most diverse ideological revisions, inciting a permanent state of doubt and conceptual risk. It appeared then that this option for figurative painting was a bit extemporary, because the artist chose to leave aside ready images, dispensing with the communicative and militant advantages that these could provide and thus leaned toward a sounding of the internal and, let’s say, constitutive dimension of painting.
Consequently, his work tended to run counter to the pressures of the present, away from “valuing” the moment, from action, and the contextual concerns of a large part of contemporary art. This stance demanded physical time for production, that is, sufficient time to invest in the sensitive qualities and empirical developments of painting. In this case, the formal instance of the work would always be obliged to test a kind of historical plasticity inherent in the pictorial matter.
Clearly the “slowness” and the materiality which the canvasses required to disclose their images would seem incongruent compared with the instantaneous and limitless availability of images in the contemporary art world. But they are supposed to deal with just that - re-encountering the kinship between the subjective universe of things and its universal referents in the universe of material life. More than describing the world in images, what comes into play then, is provisionally leaving aside everything that is solely optical, so to speak, to reveal the anthropological, exploratory, and, in sum, something like a generic human quality of the images.
Such a choice presented an arid track for the artist’s work, since the greater part of the art produced from the 80’s until now has treated figurative painting almost invariably with a tone of commentary, and would call an option such as this into metaphysical question. For Sérgio Fingermann, nonetheless, the main question is whether painting (against all evidence to the contrary) could still propose new configurations of the contemporary world of technique. That is, of a “nature” in constant mutation (itself a permanent source of new images without any reference to an original substratum) and at the mercy of technological processes of transformation ever more autonomous and able to decline the cognitive and reflective specialities of artistic thought. In the end, the work seemed not to want to accept the immanence of vision in the spiritual comforts in the new pragmatic cultural scene as a given.
It would be important to know whether painting shows itself capable of some sense of autonomy and productivity in this situation, in which things, in order to happen, have no further need than to stay in neutral, - and so notions such as “autonomy” or “productivity” would not matter at all.
Obviously, such an attitude would tend to value the craft-like nature of the artist’s work procedure, that is, its lasting empirical confrontations, invested in testing the resistance of the “plastic vocations” of pictorial matter. This also mean that these procedures are meant to liberate a figurative painting fed on some historical oxygen, and thus not entirely apparitional.
In the course of these procedures, an expanded measure of time result. In this sense, time becomes a key element in the work, an index of the friction which each painting would have to produce to allow the figures to free themselves from the undifferentiated plasm of images which tirelessly fattens the “enfant gâte” of contemporary culture.
In this way, the artist relativized the visual quality (optical, as they say) of his works, the external and consumable face, inversely drawing attention to an impossible “perpendicular” apprehension (as he himself declared) of the images. These images would then be released, disclosing the internalized narration, produced as a kind of retrospective movement. This explains, after all, why such figures are frequently embedded in an almost undifferentiated manner in the (virtual) layers of a “wall,” a surface created by superimposition and the progressive weathering of colors.
Given that there is no privileged center in these canvasses, and neither is there a single pattern of scale, (since each object and each area represented belong only to the respective spaces that they enclose, calling for heterogeneous and initially incommunicable points of view), the eye must work doubly hard in continually discerning a visual field, and differentiating and selecting the images that will constitute a significant visual universe.
It is clear, of course, that what counts here is not just the confessional tenor we infer from such images. The paintings deal not only with personal memory, accumulated bit by bit, but at the same time with the formal memory of the history of modern art, so that they end up irritating contemporary sensibility with a lyrical but dispassionate reconsideration of the modern project, in its ideals of autonomy and the constitutive power of forms.
While aware of the truth that a pop image can contain, in that such a figuration seals its farewell to all interrogation by fundamentals, by sentiments of profundity, the artist is betting on a figurative painting capable of recovering, at least, the prerogative of infusing criteria into, and ascertaining personal discrimination in this heteronomous scenario.
Because, if there is no convincing way of representing the entire bodies of objects (the artist almost always uses fragments) his paintings don’t surrender the prerogative of restoring a semantic field to them, in which the marks of subjectivity, if no longer having a guarantee of receptivity in the contemporary situation, could perhaps reappear, through the work of time and of memory. But this, of course, depends on a personal disposition for forgetting or recalling things.
As can be seen, Sérgio Fingermann’s work attributes a high power of discrimination to vision. In this sense, the strong presence of drawing in his paintings, is quite understandable, like a kind of motor element that organizes and takes pictorial material from the empirical. Here I am thinking, naturally, of the classic tradition of drawing, which is conceived as endowed with a unique intellectual power, an instrument for ordering the visible, of knowledge of and control over nature.
The artist’s numerous etchings attest in a clear way to the constructive, an illuminating sense that the work in general ascribes to drawing. It transmits to the paintings something which can still suggest to contemporary art the sense of projecting and intervening normatively in the real. As the artist himself once wrote, “Painting gives us no guarantee of comprehending its process. It demands that we abandon ourselves to a certain disorientation. But it is difficult for us to let ourselves become completely disoriented, because all our effort tends toward the sense of construction.”
It is worth stressing, in this phrase, how much it concedes to intellectual doubt and to dialogue (in the constructive sense of the modern tradition) in its modest inquiry into some constitutive truth of the image. What will be seen, in any case, in Sérgio Fingermann’s paintings, are the residual forms of that classic idea of drawing, battling to circumscribe the collective dimension of a personal imaginary, and (with that) revealing the puerile inconsistency of a world excited by partial objects.
Sônia Salzstein, 1995
Sérgio Fingermann was born in São Paulo in August 1953.
His artistic training included drawing classes with Yolanda Mohalyi in São Paulo (1972-73) and drawing and painting with Mário de Luiggi in Venice, Italy (1973-1974).
Upon returning to Brazil, he completed his artistic training at the Escola de Arte Brasil and earned a degree in architecture from the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo - University of São Paulo (1975-79).
Beginning in 1975, he has been working in painting and engravings seeking to construct a poetic universe, with strong intimist characteristics, through repeating signs, graphic annotations, and memories.
Little by little this narrative figuration yields ground to works with more abstract characteristics.
The pictorial plane then receives a treatment which seeks to reveal its own construction.
The symbolic elements of the works merge on the surface of the painting the gesture become more dramatic and space, which earlier had been treated as the place of representation, as if it were a stage, materializes like the subject of painting itself.
Once again little drawings, graphic annotations, memories arise in the recent paintings; now just as evocations on the surface of the canvas, which has been transformed into a kind of territory of memories.
Exercises
The wall is a lesson
I look there frequently and turn back to my pictures, seeking to construct surfaces with memory in them.
In this memory I search for a phrase illuminated by the opaque.
With portraits, I learn the silence they hold.
With the smell of humid moss growing between the floor and the wall, I remember my childhood.
With rocks, boxes, tress, drawing, spots, sketches, I make images, because words fail me.
I remember, at the beginning things had only appearances.
Ideas came afterward.
It sometimes happened, on certain windy days, upon closing the door to my former studio, that whirlwinds formed carrying leaves, sticks, little insects, scraps of paper.
This vision impressed me.
Add to this impression the loud noise of airplane engines which often pass there, en route to the airport.
That sensation of strangeness and revelation filled me with enchantment.
I call these moments of happiness.
Perception admits lacunas.
Painting teaches us to see in a special way.
In my case, painting has required years of craftsmanship to develop.
I see myself a bit like a carpenter.
I am learning to build something better and it is over the course of my lifetime that it will be ready.
Yes, now I am sure, perceiving admits lacunas.
Painting is transforming the material. It is making a bridge of it.
It is a record of future persecutions.
My desires are impulses, the will to transform language into a bridge.
With each new painting, night or day, the abyss is renewed.
It is necessary to leap across it.
Each work is testimony to a crossing.
It is necessary to live.
I am surrounded by death.