“As all that is real
is thick.
That river
is thick and real.”

João Cabral de Melo Neto

The artistic journey of José Bechara unfolds in a blend of multiplicities. The exhibition, that is now taking place is the synthesis of a long 35-year journey, which began with an immersion in painting at Lage Park (Rio de Janeiro), also extended to other experiences, such as sculpture. Here, one finds a keen perception of life and creation, including the dimension of gesture, memory and the presence of things through their embedding and pulsation.

In an operation where movements and rhythms get together with artistic creation and, above all, with the pictorial exercise, nuances and shades of colors intertwine with lines that, vibrant and meandering, deposit themselves in the space of experimentation in a singular chromatic exploration, with oxidations that bear witness to the passage of time, a kind of psychic and sensitive density embedded in the existence of objects. 

Atlas-memória (Atlas-memory) — also the title of a work — evokes an essay written by philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman about art historian Aby Warburg. The essay serves as a key to understanding Warburg’s process of assembling his work, establishing connections between life and art, with an emphasis on the creative process of his final project, the Atlas Mnemosyne, which is understood as incomplete. And incompleteness seems fundamental to José Bechara: the dimension of error, chance, rupture, of what is not entirely given. 

The shift in perspective and meaning that Warburg undertook in his life’s work can be found in Bechara, who, in his attempt to uncover, through archaeological traces, the necessary ruptures, disconcertment and unease inherent in the creative, explores the world and his own path. Warburg’s atlas harbors a vast array of rarities, engaging in dialogue Arabic astrology, astronomy, history, alchemy, magic and much else that was forgotten with time, erased by the rationalist model of the world. And this is a decisive aspect of Bechara’s work, in which images survive and return in the same movement, also constructing — with a kaleidoscopic vision affirmed in his set of paintings — a particular atlas. 

In Atlas-memória, we find the dimension of experience in its imaginative potency. It is a collection of works that encapsulates the artist’s own history in relation to art: here are the vestiges of awe in the first encounter with The Bathers by Rembrandt; the amazement upon seeing an exhibition by Malevich that expanded and exploded his relationship with geometry; the epiphanic and infinite emotions from revisiting Goya and Velázquez at the Prado Museum (Spain). The references, however, are not literally translated. They are alive and pulsating, sustaining the enigma of a journey that resists being fully captured. 

The Baroque, the artist’s passion, is present, in a decantation close to poetic exercise, in the darkness of some works, behind gestures that are not revealed, like a mystery that, based on formal geometric rigor, dilutes contours and limits, but is always porous and open to events.

Like Galileo’s astronomy, Bechara’s work is not flat. With movement and depth, it surprisingly and disruptively safeguards the spark of Baroque restlessness. The dimension of gesture and memory is the central point of a work that, displacing things from the center, proposes new arrangements. All together and colliding: the Baroque with a certain appropriation of Modernism and a dissent that embraces imprecision as ethics.

By exhibiting an atlas, the artist also exposes himself, places himself in crisis, accepts deviation and accident, disrupts order, creating a hesitant geometry where lines appear, disappear and reappear, condemning certainties. If, from a formal perspective, there is a connection to geometry and Constructivism, from a symbolic perspective there is a kind of restlessness that encompasses existence. In fragmented territories of color, we find an eruption of visual epiphanies forged through clear formal procedures, but which preserve enigma, zones of shadow and undefined territories. By corrupting certainties, his work embraces something close to the inexorable, almost musical. A visual rhythm is present, with an unique combination with abstraction that establishes a portrait of what is not visible but considers materiality. Chromatic phenomena are unveiled in their various manifestations, and there is now the presence of a palette of high contrast, where colors come to be understood as constructive elements, which can establish new spatial relationships. Painting and color are not merely representations but living realities. 

From the beginning, chance was incorporated into Bechara’s work. The oxidation process, for instance, emerged accidentally when the artist, handling truck tarpaulins, discovered ferrous objects that caused stains, revealing a chromatic relationship between rust and the greenish gray of the tarpaulins. A stain creates a new world in which the dimension of appearance happens through memory: something is revealed and produces an impact that reverberates to this day. The oxidation of ferrous emulsion is a fine capture of chance and the reactions and presences that occur in the work, surroundings, and the world. There is no established space, but a restless and disconcerting operation that, defying a fixed perspective, leads us to experience different spatial approaches and thicknesses of the world. Stepping on the ground, José Bechara gazes into the enigma, the poetry and the infinity of the cosmos. 

Bianca Coutinho Dias