DRAWING IS MY POINT OF ARRIVAL

Emília Ferreira — I thought it would be interesting to look at your work processes and how you decide to change your technique of representation, your technique of lines. What goes through your head and what is the relationship between head and hand?

Pedro Gomes — I have a very programmatic and rationalised relationship with my work. Therefore, all of these aspects are constructed, decided a priori. The work in itself is almost like recovering an emotional relationship with an object that I construct on a certain subject. It is a programmatic project drawing, constructed in stages. There is a subject, a search for images that have to do with this subject: they can be people, buildings. The whole process leads to the emotional relationship between the hand and the line, to arrive at a personal, emotional, representative dimension. Drawing in itself is not my point of departure. Traditionally, drawing is associated with an expression that precedes the emotional and intuitive side of ideas, which are developed in the moment of drawing. My work is the opposite of this: I rationalise and, in the end, I try to recover emotionality. This is my point of arrival. I decide to spend a lot of time on this in order for it to happen – so that the thought, the hand and the material being used become just one thing. This is the moment I try to arrive at.

EF. — So it is the representation of the experience and its mutations in time.

PG. — Yes. The alteration of the constructed, rational experience. I often start with an image of a shared experience, not an individual one. This all comes from my point of view. I remember my experience of studying architecture: it is all very rationalised. We distance ourselves from the object itself. In architecture, the object is constructed much later.

EF: — So first you start with an image you have captured, that comes from a personal interest of yours, from a point of view, as you mentioned. There is a rational side to this matrix that is gradually transformed into an emotional expression through drawing. How exactly do you do that? How do you introduce emotion into this rational frame?

PG. — The subjects I work with have a lot to do with our experience of the world, through a universe of images created to be experienced briefly and without much consideration. They gain importance because there are common aspects which are very repetitive. This trivialisation results in uniformity. We are not always talking about individualised experiences, but trivialised experiences, and it is this blind date with the world – which gives the exhibition its name – that I focus on in my work. My work process is to attempt to do something which nowadays is almost anachronistic: to imprint an image. To make it physical. These days, we look at images as something digital. I make them physical through the process of imprinting. Here we are talking about drawing. This is my studio practice. I add time differentiation to brief and undifferentiated images. I extend time so that it can be seen, so that it becomes part of my experience.

EF: — The process has various expressions. Sometimes it is more linear, with compositions of very geometric lines; in other works there is a more noticeable game of perception. When we get closer, we become aware of a more introspective act; when we distance ourselves, we recover the more rational side of the project. How do you choose the different types of representation?

PG. — These two works (I’m afraid I’m not here at the moment, but you can leave a message after the beep..., from 1996, and the drawings Untitled, from 2020) have aspects in common, although they are twenty-four years apart. The ballpoint drawings, from 1996, are the imprints of a single image. In my approach, I make having two moments of perception (the physical approximation and distancing of the observer) into something significant. When we distance ourselves, we see an image which originated in a photograph, a more anonymous space, without people, public and commercial spaces, places of work, which are conceived and created as social scenarios. When we get closer, we see the physical side of this object: the material, the drawing and the time that I spent on this experience as a doodle.

EF: — This drawing is a type of calligraphy, an intimate expression. The paper itself is a skin on which the writing is inscribed.

PG. — Yes. We are always inscribing small signs on paper. It is a kind of calligraphy out of which we construct something. This was one of the first times that I used this in an explicit way. Therefore, these works were the first to be chosen for this exhibition. When I made them, I realised that I liked this game of approximation and distance. This has also happened in other works. My basic training in the visual arts is in sculpture, so it follows that my work is interested in the use of materials and the way each material has a corresponding meaning, or way of approaching it.

EF: — Is there a material or volumetric endeavour in your work?

PG. — There is a material, but also spatial endeavour. All of these drawings enter into dialogue with the space. They complete one another.

EF: — Even the dimensions. You chose large paper to create a more theatrical feel, I suppose.

PG. — Yes. For people to engage with this idea. I think the exhibition space is very important. In the most recent work on display, the subject is the exhibition space. The works are displayed in specific places and this is intentional. Our experience in a given space completes the artwork. For those who have the responsibility of curating, this is obvious. It is also obvious for me, as an artist. I do this work thinking that I’m going to display it publicly. It is not confessional. Once more, my drawing is personal; it has a constructed emotional relationship. It is a point of arrival, not a point of departure. I like space, materials... These are all concerns of mine, and the response tries, in each series, to frame this question and create a possible solution.

EF: — Is it about resolving a visual problem?

PG. — Yes. It is in my nature, when I create, not to give answers. While I attempt to avoid rationality and create a subjective, emotional relationship, what I am trying to achieve is not the clarity of a solution; it is the evasion of rationality.

EF: — Emotions offer us more paths to follow. Something that is purely rational might lead us to a closed door.

PG. — Yes. And to one door only. We arrive at one place. Our relationship has to be more complete. There are many more questions involved in the emotional relationship. The experiences we have had are much more complex than arriving at luminous, clear places. The artwork does not come from believing that the world is clear. On the contrary. It is much more complex and this is infinitely challenging.

EF: — If we know where we are going, perhaps we won’t go there, because we already know. Is obscurity of the future important, in both life and in drawing?

PG. — Time is part of this process. In art, we feel affinity with works that are five hundred or a thousand years old. These artists (and these works) are our interlocutors, accomplices and companions in moments which, for us, are profoundly significant. This is what makes artworks more than just information or records of a certain time. They are always objects which we relate to in a subjective way and which will, years from now, make other, different people have another relationship with these works. This is the nature of the work we are doing.

EF: — Time is very present in your work. Would you say that it is something you were aware of in your youth or something that you began to develop more consistently over the years?

PG. — I think that the exhibition helps answer this question, because we chose works from quite far back. It is almost a psychological analysis which I can respond to. When we decided to take these works from the middle of the 1990s to today, it was with an awareness of time. I think that time is relevant, especially nowadays, when everything is fast. It is important to give things time. This is my commitment, while I am drawing, while I am working. Life can be experienced in many ways, all of them interesting, but this is a point of contact with the observer. I intend to bring time to the observer, so that they have the notion that we are extending the duration of their enjoyment of the work. This is why the dimensions are larger than the intimate dimensions of the representation of the idea or the first experience: to extend the duration of the experience for the public and to force the public to stop and make time for these works.

EF: — How do you integrate and define the possibility of error?

PG. — Error is the humanisation of the work. A work without mistakes cannot be humanised. In the drawing I construct processes of imprinting. If I didn’t want to humanise and make it into a work of art I would be just a machine producing these images and they would become images of a different kind: publicity, or information. I still believe that an artistic object is profoundly human, subjective and subject to error and the personal decisions and representation of a personal and intimate experience – and only that way will it also be an intimate and personal experience for the person who sees it afterwards.

EF: — Let’s return to the process. You start by capturing an image, and then what do you do? Do you project it onto the paper? Or are you inspired by a previous drawing of the captured image?

PG. — For me, digital tools are drawing tools. Nowadays, the image is digital (it is captured with digital media), and then I use this media to work. Next, I transfer it to paper, and I begin to experiment, normally at a scale of 1:1, with the final dimensions.

EF: — Let's move on from your drawings, which sometimes have pictorial tendencies, to other works of a more sculptural nature, with relief. How do you move between these supports and experiences?

PG. — In the exhibition there is a sculpture from 1995, Estarei sempre contigo [I will always be with you].

EF: — The oldest work in the exhibition.

PG. — Yes. I have always drawn every day, for as long as I can remember, in a variety of ways; often it is my most basic and practical form of communication. However, I studied sculpture, so materials, decisions about them and the problems posed by each of them have always interested me. Here we are exhibiting sculpture – something that I no longer do in this way. But this informs the drawings, which are very material. Aluminium is a drawing material here. These faces were taken from offset newspaper prints. They were minuscule and unimportant. I enlarged them and transferred them to cast aluminium. These faces are drawing. Designating my work as drawing is the field...

EF: — Is the field that brings it together.

PG. — Yes. I feel that this allows me to define it. I use paint, but I’m not a painter. I am not solving problems of painting; I am working on other things. When I say that I draw, I feel that this makes sense.

EF: — Let us talk about the works in the series Masturbações [Masturbations]. They are very organic and make one think of reliefs. I thought they were reliefs when I saw them for the first time in photographs. How did this form come about? Is it a process similar to the one used in the aluminium pieces?

PG. — It is. And I didn't do them long afterwards. Regarding the decision-making process: I have to allow for chance and I have to allow for the decisions concerning each project to be about the subject of representation, how to photograph it; then, turning the photograph into a drawing, and the material – it all has to make sense. There is something organic in all of this. These surfaces – it is not a work of lines, but of surfaces – have a lot to do with the characteristics and possibilities of the material. Similar to the aluminium pieces, it has the characteristics of a material that becomes liquid and then solidifies. This work is made out of dirt from the vacuum cleaner of our house; it is a work about our private lives.

EF: — Do you think the material was fitting for the theme?

PG. — Yes. Dirt: an almost infinite source of information. We can look at it in a macro and micro way, and it is infinitely revealing.

EF: — Because it is made up of the particles of our bodies, which we shed.

PG. — And the bodies of our pets, for those of us who have domestic animals. It is everything that our house has to say about us. What happens in our private lives is captured in our domestic waste and in the dirt that collects in the vacuum cleaner, an idea that I found very interesting. These works were created following 9/11 and that infinite cloud of pulverised materials and an almost absolute reality led me to think that this material...

EF: — Would be good to paint with?

PG. — Yes, it had a big dose of reality in it and a reality with an interesting density. We are not always talking about the more luminous, more superficial side of reality.

EF: — The shadows are there too. There is a dark side.

PG. — Yes. It is to do with that. This work was presented for the first time in a house from the 19th century, which was empty, uninhabited, abandoned twenty years ago, dense with dirt. These figures were isolated in rooms and spoke of isolation and the act of masturbation as an inconsequential, solitary pleasure. Now we are displaying them under the title Blind Date. Choosing dirt is choosing this: it is choosing a material with a great capacity for symbolism. Once more, we are talking about shared experiences. These images come close to pornography: the most trivial of images. They are not trivial, but they evoke triviality and are made of dirt from inside our home.

EF: — And the burnt figures, with the photographs?

PG. — This is the flash of the photographic moment as we knew it several years ago. Digital media now has the capacity to capture light in a different way, but, for us, it was like this for a long time. I think it is interesting, when looking at these objects, to consider the term snapshot, which we used to associate with a flash of light. Perhaps today, for those who are only familiar with the digital image and digital photography, this doesn’t make sense, but this is what these images are about. They are images that hardly present themselves as images. These works are about what is left in the moment the image is captured.

EF: — This mark that devours the drawing expands, creating a feeling of anxiety.

PG. — Yes. It is not a calm drawing. While it is meticulous and objective, the drawing has this anxious side to it, a void that results from the violence of the fire, which gives it another interpretation. I propose another density, by letting the violence of the fire burn a substantial area of the drawing, introducing something new in the trivial image of a person taking a photograph.

EF: — Once again, the question of chance and time. The erasure, a consumption, something almost self-devouring, of the drawing that consumes itself, that burns itself.

PG. — And using fire is using erasure and chance. Accident. This is literally using an accident, in the grave sense of the word, as an integral part of the work.

EF: — Of a wound, in some way.

PG. — Yes, we tear it. The question of the wound on the surface. You mentioned skin, the question could therefore be this incision on a surface, we are making a mark, a scratch.

EF: — Leaving a scar.

PG. — The scar that’s left behind by all of this.

MNAC, 10 February 2020