GAËTAN (1944)

Gaëtan is one of the artists most consistently questioning drawing in a country where, since the 70s, this medium has become the most fertile field in terms of conceptualisation and exploration of the linguistic and academically established limits of art. Gaëtan’s work is radical because it accomplishes this feat through the deconstruction of his own face in a disturbing and mysterious investigation whose contours are situated in the core of being itself, in the experience of transcendence, “the only possible revelation of the wonder of thought and of infinity”, to quote Levinas. 

His first artworks are from the late 70s. These pieces were made with paper, but challenged the exclusivity that this medium naturally implies; rather than its traditional role, paper was employed as a material to be modelled. In this respect, Gaëtan partook of avant-garde trends and their respective leitmotiven – the call to spectator participation, the use of poor materials and their fragility – and began to sketch out an appeal to transgression, that would be accomplished through the mediation of his own body.

This theme begins in the Quantum Santis (1981) series, where the drawing, a stroke in ink over a water colour wash is accompanied by the phrase “if done with a knife this stroke may be fatal”. Drawing is thus defined as a zone of danger and urgency.

Drawing, in its instability, is instigated by a longing for certain mismatching. Although he is right-handed, Gaëtan adopts the premise of drawing with his left hand with the evident intention of eradicating any remnants of academicism from his practice. The strokes are inscriptions, at times biting and satirical, at others merciless and violent. These inscriptions are woven from the meandering of memory, traced from remote reminiscences.

After 1981, Gaëtan obsessively developed a unique treatment of the self-portrait theme. Since then his investigation has developed as an art of escape, as elaborated in the variations on a single theme: his face. Ranging from an ironic stare to a grimace of despair, Gaëtan’s self-portraits interrogate the nature of his own existence, both as drawings and as questionings of “Self” – as drawings of the same single face constructed from innumerable and imperceptible differences. “What interests me most, in front of this mirror, is to register what I see. Enormous concern is given to what I am seeing. Afterwards, everything seems to be left in confusion. I look into the mirror so fixated and intensely, to see what I see, that I must misread reality […].” As this meditation develops, several issues emerge with varying degrees of intensity and persistence. Execution becomes its own analysis, it questions its value as art, how it evolves, how it ages, and even its own death; drawing progressively becomes an invocation not only of the inexorably passing moment, but also of the works that have preceded; the variation of the moments of execution in relation to the erudite concerns that the title of the work usually references, reveal time and memory as the real themes in Gaëtan’s work.

NUNO FARIA