Alberto CARNEIRO (1937)

Between the years 1947 and 1958, when he busied himself working in wood, stone and ivory in his village’s religious art workshop, Carneiro claims he led an “imaginary” existence, a life lived completely in his own imagination. After having studied Sculpture at the Oporto School of Fine Art, he completed his training and graduated at the Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. From 1972 to 1985, Carneiro was responsible for the artistic and educational programme of the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra. He was scholar of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Oporto (1962-67) and London (1968-70) and additionally received a subsidy from the Foundation to study forms and procedures related to the “aesthetic arrangement of the earth” (1975-76). He made field trips to Europe, the US, Brazil and the North of Africa and participated in several art and art education conferences.

His work coincides with the search for the foundations of creativity and its anthropological meaning. Alberto Carneiro envisions art as a cultural, political and ethical act with parameters that assist the work of the imaginary. Carneiro claims that his artistic activity intends to be inscribed in an archetypical, unconscious and symbolic collective memory. He participates in this memory with an individual inscription. A specific form of communion between the nature of art and the pursuit of an inner revelation results from this conception. The quest for a vital meaning in his work, implies several demands: that the artist’s body be totally implied in the work, that profound needs be experienced and that the observers participate and contemplate the work by separating what they see from the artist, hereby placing the work’s capacity to be constantly renewed in motion.

Carneiro speaks of “Man’s second nature” or the reencounter with nature by means of a culture or an idea, by means of appropriation or recreation, and thus infers that “what is artificial is natural to Man, his true nature”. The invisible structures in nature and those of micro and macrocosms can be found and identified in each and every living or inert organism. According to Alberto Carneiro, these hidden structures communicate with what is universal and relate to art and life with the same vital force.

The presence of his first infancy, his first playful creations with traditional crafts, and his intimate relation with the land reappear in his work like an unconscious urge, but also as concept, sublimation and intentionality in O Canavial: Memória Metamorphose de um Corpo Ausente (The Reedbed: Memory Metamorphosis of an Absent Body, 1968), Um Campo Depois da Colheita para Deleite Estético do Nosso Corpo (A Field After the Harvest for Our Body’s Aesthetic Delight, 1973-76) or Meditação e Posse do Espaço Paisagem como Obra de Arte (Meditation and the Possession of Landscape as a Work of Art, 1977).

Between 1963 and 1966, Macho e Fêmea (Male and Female), Tese (Thesis) or Raiz, Caule, Folhas, Flores e Frutos (Roots, Stems, Leaves, Flowers and Fruit) from his oeuvre in sculpted wood, exemplify the unitary and organic synthesis or opposition in complex systems. His installation Ele Mesmo Mandala em Si (He Himself His Own Mandala) from 1978 accomplishes another kind of synthesis related to the manifestation of the similarity to what lies within and beyond oneself and the revelation of the cosmic order of all beings.

In projects like A Árvore dentro da Escultura (The Tree in Sculpture) and A Escultura dentro da Floresta (Sculpture in the Forest, 1968-69) or Os Quarto Elementos (The Four Elements, 1969-70), O Laranjal– Natureza Envolvente (Orange Grove– Enveloping Nature, 1969) and Vinte e uma Janelas sobre a Paisagem (Twenty-one Windows over a Landscape, 1973), Carneiro proposes relationships that refer to the nature of art. These installations project the observer’s perception beyond the exhibition hall or the limitations of the exhibition site. In Corpo Rio (River Body, 1981), Distâncias para Andar e Meditar (Distances to Walk and Meditate, 1969), Árvore Escultura Viva (Tree Living Sculpture, 1972), Operação Estética em Vilar do Paraíso (Aesthetic Operation in Vilar do Paraíso, 1973) and Caldas de Arengos (1974-75) or Sete Rituais Estéticos sobre um Feixe de Vime na Paisagem (The Seven Aesthetic Rituals on a Sheaf of Osiers in Landscape, 1975), the space and time given for appreciating each installation is substantially extended by photographs that document his interventions and trajectories through natural landscapes.

Alberto Carneiro’s oeuvre presents five important mechanisms:

1st– A philosophical course that traverses the study of profound psychology, “corporeal dynamics”, Zen Buddhism, Tantra and Taoism. This absorption is featured in the numerical and geometric symbols, the location coordinates, his recovery of the Pythagorean fundament of numbers, the action and the vertical, oblique and horizontal relationship of elements, as well as the inscription of the spiral, the labyrinth, the mandala and aesthetic minimalism in his work.

2nd– His defence of the founding and designatory gesture of art in nature; his proposition of the ideas “thought/sculpture”, “gesture/thought” and the immaterial energy that vibrates within these concepts.

3rd– Writing as an extension of his work. According to Alberto Carneiro, certain energies can only be released and become conscious when verbalised within theoretical discourse. His projects are described and annotated with minutiae and are full of assertions and aphorisms, for instance, the programme for interventions in Notas para um Diário (Notes for a Diary) or O Caderno Preto (The Black Book, 1974-81), which are indeed works of art, themselves. On the other hand, Uma Linha para os teus Sentimentos Estéticos (A Line for Your Aesthetic Feelings, 1970-71) proposes a spatial experience of writing and metaphor.

4th– The determination that nature “serves to polarise our aesthetic feelings”. In his Notas para um Manifesto de Arte Ecológica (Notes towards a Manifesto of Ecological Art, 1968-72), Carneiro discloses the need to discover the most archetypical memories at the fulcrum of our daily activities.

5th– The centricity of the notion of the “Subtle Body”– approximating the cosmic body; our physical bodies are understood as an extension and way of expressing the transformations in our own subtle bodies. In a work with this very title (1988), Carneiro develops a dense set of central aphorisms as a means of understanding his artistic position. He began working on it in 1971, at a time when he had stopped working with his hands and sculpting material. Carneiro worked on “subtle body” for thirteen years. In 1983, he suspended the act of sculpting material once more in the works Percursos na Paisagem– Memória do Corpo sobre a Terra (Journeys through the Landscape– Memory of the Body over the Land), Variações sobre um Haikai de Bashô (Variations on a Bashô Haikai, 1984-85), Corpo/Árvore I e II (Body/Tree I and II), Tântrica e Mântrica (Tantric and Mantric, 1987), Memória do Corpo sobre a Terra (Memory of the Body over the Land, 1983-84) or Mandala de Fogo (Mandala of Fire, 1991).

Carneiro eloquently approaches the “tree”– a recurring element in his work– as a second nature built as art in Meu Corpo Vegetal (My Vegetal Body), one of his latest individual exhibitions (Oporto, 2003). His installation of tree trunks of different sizes, Uma floresta para os teus Sonhos (A Forest for Your Dreams, 1970) from the CAMJAP collection, invites the observer to physically and spatially experience this commitment.

Reviews of Alberto Carneiro’s oeuvre have been held at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Casa de Serralves (1991), the Machado de Castro Museum and Pátio da Inquisição Gallery in Coimbra (2000), the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporânea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2001) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Funchal, Madeira (2003).

LEONOR NAZARÉ