ANIMATTACK - english version
Undertaken over the course of the past several years, Animattack brings together a series of works by Bruno Vilela, works which, touching upon each other in various ways, constitute an open collection of articulated inquiries. All except for one of the works are subject to same technique: the creation of images using dry pastel on paper which reproduce, with few alterations, central parts of scenes photographed in an uncertain past. Parts of these images have been erased soon after being made, blurring traces which used to be visible, in what makes the images partially opaque. Even the only work constituting an exception to this group of works – an oil paint on canvas – shares with the rest the will to introduce doubt on what is visually described. Such cohesion also becomes manifested in the dark and melancholic tones with which the artist elaborates each of the works, even if it is principally the theme, recurring in almost all of the works, what seems to turn them into fragments of an investigation with no determined end in sight. This is a matter which doesn’t allow itself to be reduced to the normative descriptions of speech or writing, echoing, in the field of what is signified, the dismantling of defined forms operating in each surface, whether drawn or painted (here the distinction between mediums has little import). It is a question that reaches and affects those who are exposed to the images created by Bruno Vilela, forcing upon them a broken translation into words which are never quite sufficient or adequate.
In order to come close, even if tentatively, to the sensibility outlined by Animattack, there is no path other than that of pursuing the sort of jolt caused by the way each of the works touches upon each other. If it seems evident that each drawing or painting portrays human bodies in planes with different frames – ranging from the whole body to the portrayal of the face –, the absence of parts of the faces allows for the annulment of most accepted index of humanity. Moreover, by having erased mouths, noses and sometimes ears, the figures, almost always alone, are deprived of what singularizes them before any others. What usually is left of this selective dismantling of faces, besides the poorly defined contours of the faces carried by the bodies, are almost only eyes: sometimes attentive, other times sad, maybe even amazed. In one of the works, the abstraction from everything other than the eyes is taken to its limit, and the whole figure of the body which is presumed present is reduced to just a pair of eyes dipped into the dense and mute field of blue color. In another one, the affirmation of the centrality of vision in the faces is established by adding a third eye placed above the others. And if the conceivable interpretations for the representation of this extroversion of the faculty of seeing are multifarious, in Bruno Vilela’s constructions we cannot find the affirmation of any previously existent knowledge justifying them, even if it is possible to track concepts informing us of the artist’s intention. Under the condition of invented images enough to themselves, they merely question what would be intuitively assumed, in any context whatsoever, as something which is right and already given.
Some of these figures, however, do not even have eyes, in what suggests, although in another sense, a faceless existence. These are deletions of human functions which evoke less aggressions or extreme accidents than the existence of something distinct in its nature. These are images which, in a stronger form than in the other works which are part of this group, remit us to the absolute suppression of traces with which one would be able to visually identify someone. Faceless figures moving blindly who are, paradoxically, the only ones portrayed as being in contact with others. An interaction which not necessarily imply the sharing of something, as the veiled suggestion of violent gestures present in the scenes of these encounters attests to. Perhaps in flight from regulated forms of being-in-the-world, these are figures which, in so doing, get rid of the excess matter in bodies, becoming, therefore, something unknown, the endless process Bruno Vilela names Animattack. A process without even a defined temporality, for that which is glimpsed as becoming is already inscribed in the lived, as the work O Ancestral [‘The Ancestral’] seems to allude to. Here we see a figure somewhere between man and animal – or, perhaps, a hybrid between man and spirit – who gives his back, turning away from this side of the world while penetrating a dark forest. It reminds us that these are works which demand, of those who see them, attending to what is beyond that which they will ever be able to show.
Moacir dos Anjos
english version: Milena Durante
In order to come close, even if tentatively, to the sensibility outlined by Animattack, there is no path other than that of pursuing the sort of jolt caused by the way each of the works touches upon each other. If it seems evident that each drawing or painting portrays human bodies in planes with different frames – ranging from the whole body to the portrayal of the face –, the absence of parts of the faces allows for the annulment of most accepted index of humanity. Moreover, by having erased mouths, noses and sometimes ears, the figures, almost always alone, are deprived of what singularizes them before any others. What usually is left of this selective dismantling of faces, besides the poorly defined contours of the faces carried by the bodies, are almost only eyes: sometimes attentive, other times sad, maybe even amazed. In one of the works, the abstraction from everything other than the eyes is taken to its limit, and the whole figure of the body which is presumed present is reduced to just a pair of eyes dipped into the dense and mute field of blue color. In another one, the affirmation of the centrality of vision in the faces is established by adding a third eye placed above the others. And if the conceivable interpretations for the representation of this extroversion of the faculty of seeing are multifarious, in Bruno Vilela’s constructions we cannot find the affirmation of any previously existent knowledge justifying them, even if it is possible to track concepts informing us of the artist’s intention. Under the condition of invented images enough to themselves, they merely question what would be intuitively assumed, in any context whatsoever, as something which is right and already given.
Some of these figures, however, do not even have eyes, in what suggests, although in another sense, a faceless existence. These are deletions of human functions which evoke less aggressions or extreme accidents than the existence of something distinct in its nature. These are images which, in a stronger form than in the other works which are part of this group, remit us to the absolute suppression of traces with which one would be able to visually identify someone. Faceless figures moving blindly who are, paradoxically, the only ones portrayed as being in contact with others. An interaction which not necessarily imply the sharing of something, as the veiled suggestion of violent gestures present in the scenes of these encounters attests to. Perhaps in flight from regulated forms of being-in-the-world, these are figures which, in so doing, get rid of the excess matter in bodies, becoming, therefore, something unknown, the endless process Bruno Vilela names Animattack. A process without even a defined temporality, for that which is glimpsed as becoming is already inscribed in the lived, as the work O Ancestral [‘The Ancestral’] seems to allude to. Here we see a figure somewhere between man and animal – or, perhaps, a hybrid between man and spirit – who gives his back, turning away from this side of the world while penetrating a dark forest. It reminds us that these are works which demand, of those who see them, attending to what is beyond that which they will ever be able to show.
Moacir dos Anjos
english version: Milena Durante