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Botanic Gardens, tree, oil on card, 28 x 25 cm, framed SOLD
The exhibition is a 14 picture survey of paintings from Santa Catarina, and covers work from the last 5 years.
Me
This text was written and translated, to accompany the exhibition but the administrators decided not want to include it:
Tadeusz Deręgowski, Exposição, UDESC
I`m from the UK, specifically Scotland, though I wasn`t born there. I was born in Zambia among lions and tigers and enormous crocodiles. My parents were born in Poland and Denmark. Ethnic origin is irrelevant to the development of artistic style. But I mention these details as many find them curious.
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I studied Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh, on a traditionally structured course with life drawing, anatomy and so forth: no conceptual art nonsense or fuzzy looped videos of people slowly cutting themselves or manipulating their genitals, thank you very much. I also spent some months in the Art School in Warsaw, in Communist Poland, when it was under martial law. I began landscape painting on the Fine Art course.
I came to Brazil because of my ex-wife but stayed because it suited me and because I dislike moving house. Besides, the weather in Scotland gives me depression. This country is a mess. But if you can reduce your contact with it's infuriating, incompetent larger institutions and shameless businesses to a minimum and avoid being assaulted, shot, hearing funk etc you can have a pleasant enough life.
I work plein air, usually in nature, but occasionally I work in the street, and there are several urban paintings here.
The urban environment in Brazil is particular on account of its visual disarray, and often extreme ugliness. This manifests itself in the overall spatial organistation, disharmonious relations between buildings, the low design quality of individual structures, poor levels of maintenance and construction, grafitti, and an absense of green elements to reduce the impact of so much human brutishness.
From a distance this anarchy can be visually exciting, but close up the impression is often intimidating and sad. In poor quarters, however, life is often lived publicly and it can simultaneously be sad and interesting and fun. I found, when working in Trindade, that I could walk up to Rua Nilo Mussi (from where I painted a fine Schiele-ish picture) and I felt just about okay painting there. Above that, however, I started to get the willies, sensing that I was entering an area where laws had been suspended. and I didn't linger. I have never been a victim of street crime in Brazil: "fear is a man's best friend," as John Cale sang.
Painting in the street is annoying as people insist on talking to you, and the fact of your being "public" affects negatively my creative thought processes. Like many landscape painters, I am fairly misanthropic, but I do think it is a truism that solitude is necessary for creativity, which is part of the appeal of the landscape.
For landscape painting, Santa Catarina is good, having a wide variety of environments in close proximity and generally clement weather. The lack of seasonal variation is a disadvantage, however, as is the (usually) high position of the sun, which leads to a flattening of perspectives. Another difficulty -especially compared to the UK- is the relative impenetrability of the landscape. In the UK, especially, Scotland there are public rights of access to the landed estates that make up much of the countryside. In addition there are national parks which are free and well organised.
There are national parks in Santa Catarina too, but have you ever tried to go for a walk in them? Additionally, the structure of the landscape in the UK is highly mediated, both for agricultural and recreational (usually hunting), and aesthetic purposes. Thus, the landscape is designed to give cover for a diversity of wildlife and offer wide perspectives.
In contrast the landscapist here is often restricted to views from the road, or along beaches. If you can enter the landscape the view is often that of very dense forest, and that isn't propitious for art. I work a lot in Santo Antonio where I am probably trespassing as I have to crawl under a fence to get the views I want. I am looking forward to being shot by a landowner one day, or torn to death by stray dogs.
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The pictures are made using oil paints on small cardboard supports which I can carry about in little folders. The format is practical and favours more intimate expressions.
When you show small pictures people often say, "oh but why did you not paint bigger", which is a little like saying to the writer of 2 minute pop songs, "why don`t you write operas"- as if the size of an art piece has no relation to its meaning. But of course, diminution and smallness are themselves statements, which say something about how an artist controls an environment by diminishing it, and about how the public are not to be overwhelmed by massiveness. And size says something about work and the time needed to make and appreciate something.
Moreover, concision is an essential virtue in art: let us seek guidance from the 18th century, with it's elegant, humane squares, not the 19th with it's tendency towards bombast. Few large scale works of art justify their size by their content, and massive art has associations with totalitarianism and verbosity, and both are despicable.
With this in mind, the paintings sit closer to the attitudes of the more lyrical schools of landscape painting such as Bonnard, Sisely or Whistler, rather than the epic schools. The paintings also have something to do with travel and discovery and link to the painter-traveller artists like Turner or Lear.
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The Exhibition is a smoresgasbord of Catarinense, mainly Floripan, paintings from the last four years. Most have been exhibited before but there are five paintings here that haven't been seen before. These include a forest piece from the Parque Florestal near Praia Mocambique, two urban paintings from Trindade, a painting from the Botanic Gardens of a single tree, and a wide landscape from Santo Antonio da Lisboa.
I've framed the pictures simply, though I am not wildly enthusiastic about frames: they emphasise certain aspects in a picture and contain pictures, preventing them from "breathing", a notion that is impossible really to convey in words but very obvious when experienced.
In the last, Edinburgh, show the pictures were displayed unframed but the gallery was small and constantly invigilated. So here the frames are necessary to protect the paintings.
T. Deręgowski, Florianópolis, February 2020
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