Now What? Antonio Pessoa
unpredictable as his reputation heralds, comes up with
a rather mysterious canvas, somehow suddenly breaking
away from the series of spiritual-oriented artworks
he has been presenting lately. PORTRAIT, acrylic on
canvas, Antonio Pessoa 2007, stands out of the artist's
latest line of work, with a title and a touch of art
expression reminding his late nineties oeuvre. Visiting
Pessoa's studio in the first week of November precisely
during the making of PORTRAIT, I asked him as politely
as I possibly could what was going on. The artist sits
in front of me and without any beating about the bush
preambles, tells me he needed urgently to demystify
someone we both knew, searching for logical evidence
and accurate clues in order to explain through art expression
and very particularly to himself the true nature and
deep motivations of the eccentric character represented
in PORTRAIT, his inherent complex of attributes plus
his restless actions and reactions. Once identified
Portrait's heart and soul, I'm quite sure the artist
from that step on is having so much fun, now able and
available to play the game, hanging out provided with
the third vision of perception and thereby watching
whoever is behind this abstract painting, articulating
his focus and looking beyond the surface, deep, above
and below, defenitely seeing a whole lot more than what
any viewer eventually shall see whatever, whoever the
image truly manifests and represents. Once again the
superior mirage of the natural privilege of being an
artist gives him probably the genuine right to keep
a whole lot of secrets for himself, therefore the puzzling
secrecy and identity of Portrait keeps the viewer asking
the same old questions over and over again, and this
premeditated cause and effect reaction manipulation
is the typical modus-operandi of Antonio Pessoa's harmless
playful moody games, when it comes to use art as his
favorite tool in order to challenge the viewer's thoughtful
and sometimes painful discernment process about how
to actually approach a purposely ambiguous topic, randomly
experiencing multiple assumptions and considering several
aspects of an apparently faceless Portrait, particularly
in this thrilling situation in which the artist provides
no antidotes whatsoever for the viewer's ocular interpretation
let alone navigate across the ocean of speculative exploring,
and consequently come up at least with a dim light at
the end of the tunnel after a meticulous eternity trying
to figure out the artist's intentions, jumping at last
to the twisted-grinning accurate conclusion that the
hidden consistency of Portrait was from the very beginning
meant for the artist to know and for the viewer to find
out. More than a visual illusion, Portrait's equivocal,
cryptic, enigmatic, "top secret" possibilities,
incorporates key-references, trying and actually succeeding
to provide the viewer with a super universe of infinite
research tools, however in the meantime creating a mysterious
traffic of visual tactics almost suggesting that the
one meant to have been the inspiring model is pure imagination
fiction, that the true meaning of this painting, maybe...
just maybe, might as well still be under construction.
Basically, all I could really do to help in the hope
to cool the viewer's anxiety or make the viewer consider
the evidence of no evidence at all, would possibly be
to gently say "give it up and just sit, relax and
enjoy it", for after all it seems to me quite obvious
Portrait was indeed meant to be from the very beginning
a conceptual artistic camouflage. A mystery Portrait,
an artist's secret, revealing absolutely nothing but
another interesting fine art riddle, a brain teaser
double and veiled meaning composition, meant to puzzle
the viewer and therefore a classified information artistic
enigma never to be solved. Antonio Pessoa's juicy secret
skillfully hidden perhaps behind the apparent empty
spaces of the canvas, as if answering questions with
odd questions, makes Portrait the traditional "maybe,
maybe not" sort of inscrutable, obscure, even mystical
sort of artistic disappearance, leaving no loose ends
and leaving the anonymous portrayed one forevermore
occult in the mystifying highest level of the world
fine art nameless esoteric models Olympus!
