Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 00:59:20 GMT From: anacmar-AT-mail.telepac.pt (Carlos Martins) Subject: Re: Artaud, Post-Modernism & Zapatistas In reply to Frank (cont.) and replying to (sorry to jump some points): 5- Contrarily of you, i think there are more than thousands of painters (well, not all assumed surrealists or even not all demanding for a place in "the surrealist galaxy") that continue the spirit you meant (a "inner necessity" or the "see beyond"). Of course Svankmajer is more close of surrealism than many others and his work is profoundly creative. I think we are now on a period similar as Dadaists lived during the 1st world war (well, we are not in war yet, so it`s very different by this side) - in the matter of how "to find some new to say" . But the new is made through our own voices and work now, individual or collectively. To find something on "pure state" to say would be the equivalent to eliminate the principles where we based our own work. What Surrealism did was to contribute and help to explore in every senses the poetic capabilities not only in poetry but also on art and what most tend to forget, on everyday life. And did it for all not only for a small group of persons. The fact that only some small groups of persons continue this spirit it`s not by surrealists fault. Now that some doors, closed by centuries of rationalism and obscurantism, were opened by the first generations of surrealist artists and poets, why to not explore what we see beyond it in different directions and with different means ? Why to find something "new" but that will tend to fall on "deja vu" or on the "fragmentary" as many other post and neo "isms" did? To "see beyond" those doors is explorating the ways beyond them. I guess you would say the same, as you said about Svankmajer, if you saw the works from Cruzeiro, Lima de Freitas, Mario, Raul Perez, Francisco Relogio, Antonio Quadros, Antonio Areal, Lud and others just to quote some portuguese surrealists or artists related with Surrealism. 7- Well, Mario`s works are not so figurative as Svankmajer. More than a painter Mario Cesariny is a poet that paint. "...fatality, i miss the office, i miss the office, punctually every morning" he wrotes about a a kind of "functionality" of the artistic work. More informalist than figurative, however he uses also some kind of figuration but as Lima de Freitas point out, at him "the reference to the "figure" is attacked in its morphologic integrity by the agressivity of the gesture...". But as i said, Mario is fundamentally a poet that paints too. 8- Yes, if you think so. Despite i was so far from him when i was living in the northeast Algarve we kept in touch changing some correspondance (as also with Cruzeiro, you can see one of the works from Cruzeiro on the 109 page of the "Dictionary of Surrealism" from A.Biro/Passeron). More recently i met him once during a visit i made him to talk about the matter of the exhibition here (after all who wants to make it?) and we talked for some times by phone, as i mentioned here. Mario belongs to the first generation of surrealists here and probably as you know, he met Breton, Brauner and Pastoureau. It was him with Pedro Oom (also my friend in the seventies, he died of heart attack caused by commotion, exactly the day of democratic revolution (on April 25, 1974), Mario Henrique Leiria and Cruzeiro Seixas that founded the surrealist group (also called the "anti-surrealist group of surrealists") in Portugal. (cont.) carlos
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