The immaterial and the testimonial

There he is. [Orlando Pompeu] Pompeii and Orlando, too, bom in the interior buí hardened by West and by East; guest of the clouds among which he customarily dwells, not through a simple encounter with the impossible, but through the fatal  allure of forbidden entrances. He is a painter by the díktat of instinct and training in the academies of social custom. Between Fafe and Porto, Paris and Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and Barcelona, San Francisco and New York, he hás been affirmed and reaffirmed: he hás been exalted without abandoning the throne and dream of his origins. He knew how to convey and uplift Cepâes, as a metaphor of authenticity, to consumable poetics translatable through the greedy voracity of the city.

His documents are códices of psychology and geography. He did not achieve this by purveying tints. He reconciled and re-reconciled impressions of locality with the symbology of the «dis-formal» and the «dis-converge». With smooth pedagogy he glides through the Babylonians of the image, the icons of his source of being. It can be seen in the harmonising of evidence, recognisably indefinite and intransmissible, typical and traceable. He did not have to nuliify or feign his gallery of scenes and figures. He merely had to make them cohabit with the pulsing urban-ness, technology, and creative speculation. Pompeu synthesises the emotional and the social, the content and the continent, holding in suspension in a pictorial atmosphere, a limbus and a nimbus of immateriality, even within the rigour of geometry, the vigour of physiognomy.

It is, therefore, a joyous respite from the myths of maternity and waywardness, of community and individuality, of imagination and transgression. He is reinventing Mozart in Vizela and Verdi in St. Cloud, because infancy and freedom distinguish his gestures, protests and affections.

Pompeii and Orlando, too, nomad of the boundiess, passing through Porto where

the boundaries are enveloped in the mist.

February, 1994

In Catálogo da Exposição «Horizonte de Liberdade» de Orlando Pompeu, na Fundação Eng. António de Almeida. Janeiro / Fevereiro de 1997