“Towards there, but very far down, it is a place. There's a crossroads. Roads go to Veredas Tortas – dead paths. I said, you didn't listen. Don't even mention that name again, no. Place no where. Places like this are simple – they give no warning”
Guimarães Rosa, “Grande Sertão: Veredas
When writing about artistic creation, we have to take a risk. Only in this way can we be close to the living experience of his gesture, close to the artist's daily life in order to connect us to the navel of his daydreams, where his most intimate desires, the images of his most sincere destiny, are born. Only in this way can we, without embellishment or secondary gains, expose some conscious and unconscious intentions that made Luis Alexandre Lobot get out of bed every day to produce something relevant and take the risk of exposing himself through his paintings.
From here I can say that Lobot in “YEARS PER SECOND, HOURS PER MONTHS, EVERY DAY”, does not think as he did before. I would even venture to say that he no longer works conventionally, that is, as an artist who needs a subject to paint. His new paintings, inserted into his daily life, are the result of the existential journey of a full-time artist, where painting is part of his muscles and psychological apparatus, this being his way of thinking, eating, drinking, imagining and telling. us a story.
Lobot creates images like Guimarães Rosa did with words when he wrote the country saga of the bandit Riobaldo Tatarana, our Brazilian Ulisses. The story of this time, hours on end, has the twelve labors of Hercules in conversation with the twelve years of the A7MA gallery.
A character, an enigmatic figure always present in Lobot's paintings and who has had several names, gained more corporeality and impersonality, taking the foreground of the canvas, without a face, lending us his face. Like a “semionaut”, a semiotics astronaut who navigates the symbolic universe, proposing mythological ties, making and undoing knots, uniting and disuniting different cultures, he invites us to imprint the face of our stories on him.
Without beating around the bush, Lobot suggests a decolonial revision of Greek myths, to cite one example, which are devoured by a northeastern rusticity, by the concretism and anthropophagic cruelty of an interiorized Brazil. Ocher and brown tones bring us to earth in the sense of a place that is both subjective, intimate and dreamy, as well as a historical land, inhabited by original and northeastern peoples. Here the Lobotian trickster who works tirelessly every day, always alongside the defeated, chewing ten myths per second, generates a fictional friction between the imaginary world that is in all of us and the old land that was here before the symbols and delusions humans.
Mythical surrealism, cangaço concretism, adobe techno-shamanism, anthropophagic metadata, abstract realism of ridges or the aesthetics of hunger and human blessings, are some terms that we daydream about under the new landscapes of Lobot: hours for months, earth, every day the sun is high, the synthetic materiality of a Brazilian painting.
We are captured by the serpent with a thousand heads, like a bullfighting philosopher taming the Hindu ox by the horn, barefoot, cracked foot, dirt floor and the Chinese dragon of endless travels, when we feel that the stories-stories of all human cultures are grafted onto ours, one by one, every day, hours by months, years by second, changing the course of our river. We see ourselves stunned like a rag of a Brazilian anti-hero. Herberto Helder, always a poet, every day, helps us understand the intention of the imaginary dragon that flies screaming above our heads. And he answers us in his Antropofagias, text I:
“We want to suggest things like 'image of breathing'/ 'image of digestion'/ 'image of dilation'/ 'image of movement' (…) we don't try to create pumpkins with the word 'pumpkins' (…) in the center/ we sneak in plans that cause occupations ('de-tune' opens the way for old explanations 'discourses of speeches of speeches' etc.) / let us fix this idea of 'plans'/ we can admit them as 'a kind of houses'/ or' a kind of fields'/ and then evident to be inhabited by worn paths”
Oh, okay, okay! The Lobot insists on blowing the animated fire of landscapes full of life-language. A daily and endless symbolic elegy of cataloging things, people and facts, dignifying them as someone who does nothing more and nothing less than live painting, scratching and taking risks in the risky way that is being an artist and having a structured life in arid, mobile and sandy terrain of Brazilian art. Nonada!, as Tatarana says, “living is very dangerous”
Text by Bruno Pastore, Lobotian philosopher, writer and poet.
