In Pompeu's gardens

«u(...) the innermost heart, whose functioning is a mystery to the individual himself, continued unconquered» — George Orwell, The Year of 1984

Having started on a figurative course in 1978 with a realist meaning, Orlando Pompeu evolved towards a landscape-painting based on luminous values and by I990, coinciding with his trip to New York, towards a stylised and decorative form, not lacking in the sometimes melancholy humour that the thousand repeated poses of daily life unieash. After 1986 he developed an abstraction founded on linear rhythms characterising the gesture, in strong contrasts and intense chromaticity. The emerging individual direction, at the same time as the stylisation of his figurative painting is accentuated, is, in my view, worthy of the protagonist in his work, especially in his drawings.

The line-colour of stylised figures in his painting is an arabesque which unfolds the artist's images. Figures which are sometimes quite humorous, sometimes enigmatic, contemplative or with a certain dramatic tendency. The sensation of lightness that they transmit comes from the brightness prevailing on the palette, by profiles heightening transparencies denoting an apparent absence of weight and density, the whole evoking a guignol universe. Weightlessness that calls to mind «the unbearable lightness of being», the titie of Kundera's famous novel, evoking the counter-point of drama in works like In Reply to Pompeu l and   II, 1992, where the slanting gloomy shaft of the cross is superimposed on the radiant play of forms, or In the Universe of Men, 1993, where signs of violence and aggression touch the captured ma n directly.

We feei that what is dominant in the most emblematic representation of Pompeu's style is exactly this taste for the sensual echoing of shapes touched by light, like flowers and butterflies, and figures led through the arabesque of flowing curved lines siashed by colour. The composition is sinuous and labyrinthine in equal measure, occasionally disposing itself around a centre defined by the intersection of geometric figures.

In Pompeu's gardens, also the title of one of his works, an elegant refinement recalls oriental prints (in harmony with the painter's interest in oriental art and his visit to Japan, in 1994). But the euphoria of the obvious mutations of his figures express a truly Western futility, although contradicted in some images by introspection, by the analysis of the «ills of the century» (title of several works from 1995) or the Metamorphoses of Being (a 1994 work), reflecting the anguish of present day fragmentation. The social themes and reference to symbols of the consumer society, football, television, the car, supermarkets, are elements in a diagnosis of acquired habits, striped of real meaning, leading relentlessly to the vacuum conjured up in Repercussions of Nothingness, 1994. A whirling line is intertwined in the seemingly peaceful and empty characters, configuring the possibility of the world of the apparent. Insofar as it is distinguished from the apparent, in another process, that of the epiphanies carrying secrets of the invisible and unutterable, suggested in Essence and Source of Light, 1990, and in Primary Origin, 1991. In this work, a bird enclosed in the circles of harmony, symbolises liberty, the soul and also the capacity to unite heaven and earth, matter and the spirit. The circles, clearly defined as the centre of the composition, are integrated in a kaleidoscope of geometric shapes which contains a square and rectangle of the contrasted, luminous vibration of the artist’s brilliant palette, highlighting deep blues and the solar heat of yellows, reds and oranges. This is a centre that configures purity, the harmony of a beginning, capable of bringing a meaning to the world herein represented.

Eulogy of a line 

«(...) we have the chance of penetrating the oeuvre, becoming an active part of it and living its vibrancy with all our senses»(1) — Kandinsky, Point Ligne Plan

«The image speaks the unspeakable»(2) — Octavio Paz, El Arco y Ia Lira

This world is one of visibility restricted by the co-ordinates of an ephemeral and artificial beauty, like the lines drawn by the wind in the water, seemingly condemned, though not robbed of their allure. The true reality is elsewhere, as in Rimbaud's poetry, or as Emmanuel Lévinas wrote, «La mise en question de soi est précisément l'accueil de l'absolument autre»(3).

This reality is one of a society of deceit, where human values are revealed in the gentle force of a lyricism which imposes its rules (Maternal Kiss, 1991; Youthful Affection and Horizon of Passion, 1992) and draws the Forms of Liberty (1992, 1993, 1995 and 1996) like the prophetic universes of Orwell and Huxley, where everyone is «fortunate» and no-one is happy.

The artist is aware of his dreams metamorphosed in several works where the light-coloured reverie that nourishes him emerge, thus oriented by a desire for harmony which  the circle expresses in terms of plastic art, a reverie clearly evident in works such as Forms of Creativity, and Journey to the Temple of Fantasy, both from 1996. On the other hand, in a process of self-analysis, he appeals to «a demand of lucidity» (a 1996 title), to a rationality represented by the detailed insects and which seems to be superimposed on the invading forces of sexuality and instinct. But the secret of arousing a higher level of consciousness may rather be found in an «alert to the subconscious» (another 1996 work), in a visceral scream, disposed to take the human being back to its very origins, to a «profound conception», which is a recurring theme in his painting and one which undergoes an encounter with the other, perhaps the more occult side of himself.

There is a narrative thread in the compound character of the image, in the expressiveness which is only completed in a whole, implied in the present fragmentation and also in the sequence and the various recurring themes for which we seek a possible logic in his foundations in poetry, that unconfessable nucleus of feeling that, according to Octavio Paz (4), feeds the adventure of art.

In Pompeu's work, the line seems to affirm the limits of the absurd, it demarcates territories and induces as much in his paintings as in his drawings the certainty that there is something lasting at the end of the masked bali, perhaps nothing but a «solitary affection», the title of one of his drawings, the affection of colour for form, or of gesture for its structure, a source of calligraphy that can express exactly this — a source.

The line, in the drawings, is free of colour and its dark outline falteringly delineates new icons with a feeling for the primitive celebration of life. This, after ali, may yet prove to be the boldest aspect of the work of Orlando Pompeu.

(1) «(...) nous avons Ia possibilité de pénétrer dans l'oeuvre, d'y devenir actifs et de vivre sã pulsation par tous nos sens».

(2) «La image dice Io indecible».

(3) Emmanuel Lévinas, Humanisme de l'Autre Homme, Éditions Fata Morgana, Paris 1972, p. 53.

(4) Octavio Paz, El Arco y Ia Lira, Col. Lengua y estudios literarios, Fondo de Cultura Económica, México 1981. «La imagen», p. 106-111.

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