COLOUR TAKES ME
Ângelo de Sousa

What makes a name a nickname is its metonymical nature, the capacity it has to suggest that one part of a thing can be used to signify the whole. It is, therefore, a strategy of reduction, and reduction was something Ângelo de Sousa fought for throughout his career. As the artist himself declared, he was interested in ‘maximum effects with minimum resources, maximum effectiveness with minimum effort, and maximum presence with minimum fuss’. The drawings presented in this exhibition bear witness to the encounter between these two impulses, metonymical and minimalist. The minimalist impulse gives us the tendency towards economy of means and towards representative objectivity – towards the drawing being restricted to the presentation of a single, isolated body, free of adornments or articulations with other elements. The metonymical impulse results in numerous approaches to what a ‘tree’ can be, all the variations of a series that develops as a centrifugal rather than a centripetal force.

Exploring the margins is a way of celebrating diversity. It is also a way of saying that one does not seek – perhaps, even, that one does not believe in – the essentialist version of things. Margins are, of course, zones of contact, of miscegenation, of fluidity and of possibility. They are spaces where we are obliged to negotiate the limits of our own porosity, of how ready we are to review the boundaries of our categories. The works selected for this exhibition allow us to accompany the movement Ângelo de Sousa described between the trees of the late 1950s – skilful representations of this vegetable element, some of them very detailed – and the ‘trees’ of the turn of the century – lumpy masses, like nodular roots or like tubers rendered vertical on A5 paper, drawn unrealistically with the angular tip of a marker pen. In between, a multitude of deviations, variations and alternatives that, together, prefigure the large map of the power of the ‘tree’ in the eyes of the artist.

This is not a figure of speech: Ângelo de Sousa really did see ‘trees’ when he looked at the paper. Of the thousands of drawings he did within this theme, he only kept those that he thought ‘worked’. Some of these he would use as the basis for larger drawings or even paintings; others would become a record of the marginal cartography that he attempted with every new session. All of them, without exception, are the fruit of a way of doing that, in order to ‘work’, needed to force the hand to follow what the imagination saw hovering, like a ghost, on the surface of the paper. Without diversions, without digressions. ‘When it didn’t follow it, it didn’t turn out right.’ 
When it followed it, a kind of suspension of artistic intentionality materialised. This brings to mind another complicated expression, coined by Marcel Duchamp: ‘art coefficient’. For the French artist, the art coefficient was the difference between what the artist wanted to do and what he actually did – the ‘something’ that is beyond the artist’s control, but still their responsibility. It is not chance, nor is it accident – it is the shifting of a gesture that was meant to do one thing but ended up doing another. Following a form that one sees hover over the paper, suspending all interference of will, of artistic licence, is something that is only possible through a dual training: the training of the hand to follow the imagination and of the imagination to invent the right form. The drawings presented here are the fruit of the exercise that Ângelo de Sousa did throughout his life; of the constant search for the ability to make the art coefficient equal to zero. 
 

* - All the quotes in this text are taken from the interview with Ângelo de Sousa conducted by Nuno Faria and included in the catalogue Transcrições e Orquestrações - desenhos de Ângelo de Sousa, Lisbon: CAM, 2003.