Over the course of his decades-long career, São Paulo-based artist Dudu Santos has embraced a freeform approach to painting. Like much of the work on display, the arrangement of his show “Nada é de verdade mas tudo é real” (“Nothing is true but everything is real”) at Galeria Jaqueline Martins is scattered and meandering—a seemingly random sampling of different bodies of work from the last twenty years. Each component of the show is organized with precision and care, yes, but it also evades any central premise or guiding principle: a row of small gestural portraits here, a neoexpressionist figurative painting there, a thin sculpture alone on a wall, a set of journals under glass, a painting on the floor leaning against a wall, et cetera. Both the scatalogical intensity of individual works and the drastic shifts in format and time period indicate a predilection towards the schizophrenic and the irrational.
If the show itself avoids a tight logic, certain tendencies are pulled into relief all the same. Hints of art brut, automatic drawing, and other Surrealist and proto-AbEx sentiments run through most of the work, as well as a relentless interest in the figure. Santos’ gesturalism is “Expressionist” with a capital “E,” and I suspect the artist would likely ascribe to Harold Rosenberg’s “psychology of creation”: painting as an authentic action, or a spontaneous burst of subconscious impulses. This is reinforced by the inclusion of sketchbook/journals that reflect the same painterly frenzy with train-of-thought sentence fragments such as “The Q-Tip Man! He who has the Q-Tip is powerful? The power of the Q-Tip,” or “Useless thoughts. Sterilize the Mind.”
The elephant in the room with any painter working in this vein is the inevitable sense of familiarity that a contemporary viewer will feel when looking at these expressionist gestures; these paintings hide no surprises, let alone any moments of confounding. This exhibition employs a common strategy of emphasizing the generous excess and multiplicity of forms created by this painting practice rather than a more narrowly enframed line of inquiry. At times Santos’ frenetic brushwork feels vibrant and masterfully channeled; other times it just feels hasty and purposeless. On the other hand, some of the most compelling work is the most recent, such as his mixed-media collages whose succinct marks somehow build up to more than a sum of their parts.
Dudu Santos “Nada é de verdade mas tudo é real” Galeria Jaqueline Martins Through January 25, 2016
Jordan Martins is a Chicago-based visual artist, curator, educator and musician. He received his MFA in visual arts from the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Salvador, Brazil in 2007 and has been an instructor at North Park University since 2008. He is the director of Comfort Station, a multi-disciplinary art space in Chicago with a wide variety of programs, and collaborates on programming with the Salvador-based Projeto Ativa. Martins’s visual work is based in collage processes, including mixed-media two-dimensional work, photography, video and installation. His recent work is primarily concerned with visual codes, camouflage and gestalt theory. As a musician, Martins collaborates with Angela James and Quarter Mile Thunder, in addition to improvised performances with musicians from varied backgrounds. He directed the Relax Attack Jazz Series from 2011-2013, serves on the programming committee for the Chicago Jazz Festival, and curates visual art at Elastic Arts. Contact: [email protected], www.jordanmartins.com
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