The best way to
explain what Martinho Costa presents us in his new exhibition Testigo (Witness)
is with his own words: "It must be said that the exhibition is not about
Spain or the theme of landscape nor travel" ... But this exhibition begins
with a trip indeed; a trip that he does not want to refer to, for all that the
philosophy of the trip entails, or does not want to talk about how the artist embodies
the figure of the traveller, a seeker with no return, or maybe he does not want
to see himself as a tourist, as it is described by Paul Bowels in "The
protective sky**", where the tourist will travel the world as a collector
of sensations, being always aware of his return, because this is not what
Martinho Costa wants to talk about. Because this exhibition is not about the
trip.
Testigo emphasizes the particularity of painting as the
discipline of the gaze par excellence.
From a slow, in-depth look, which does not pursue moral discourses or any other
kind of narrative, we will not find anything but the pure act of presenting
things made painting; a kind of look that makes you remain analytical. As the fifteenth
century treatise "Della Pittura" by Leon Battista Alberti introduces
us to a new era of painting, breaking with the old medieval system and dismantling
the concept of genius in favour of the virtues of diligence and dedication
involved in visual appearances, Martinho Costa brings these concepts to the
contemporary, to understand what we see in the pause of the analysis, and to
see and understand things because we are observing them. And this is his trip,
seeing and understanding in new places, with new eyes.
In his case, it
is the camera he uses as a sketchbook, as an observation tool, as a traveling
painter of the eighteenth century, who would wrote down all his visual
experiences of the new world in notebooks - and then gave free rein to the
colonizing ideas of the exotic -. Martinho Costa collects his images as
sketches that become sensitive looks of the mundane, but how to span the entire
world and catch it? It seems that this is the artist's main goal: to understand - as a philosopher would - what
happens in the world and how to express his hypotheses about it in painting.
Each new work of the artist consists of a whole at the same time. But, when
the option is the whole, how do we get to decipher that whole? Martinho Costa starts from the idea of archiving, as a
sensitive archive of things, of the tangible, and it is here that he faces what
he means by painting and what he does not. There is a
first empirical and intuitive work in selecting the images he wants to paint
but this does not always follow a pattern.
A new approach
to his pictorial practice can be seen in Testigo: he has stripped himself of
the technology that always accompanied him to face the canvas directly. A
confrontation that makes him work faster and more intensely, where he sees* his
weaknesses as an exposed painter and that makes him reflect clearly in these
terms: “I recently listened to a podcast about Francis Bacon’s current
exhibition in the Pompidou, which talked about the idea of strength in his
painting, something that made me think. The painting as witness of the
painter's force on the record of matter*. Painting made meat. Now that I
practice this “no-grid”* way of painting the muscle is more evident. The
gesture is longer, it has more doubts, sometimes it turns out, sometimes it
does not. It is a real battle. You lose or you win. Before, it was all a bit
more controlled, more towards the result, "without thinking" as
Gerard Richter says. Now I rather pursue what I decide is important in an image
(an essence).” It is for all this, perhaps, that in this exhibition we see
remnants, paintings that would lead us to abstraction or ambiguity, a
definitive new manner for Martinho Costa, a fascination for the visible.
