Maria Madalena Gonçalves Manuel Amado’s theatrical painting in "The show is about to begin..." 2009

                                              "Nothing is more contrary to dramaturgy than the dream, for the germs
                                               of true theatre are always elementary movements of prehension or
                                               distancing. The surrealness of theatre objects is of a sensorial, not
                                               an oneiric order.”

From January 18 to March 17, 2007, Manuel Amado exhibited at the Galeria de Pintura do Rei D. Luís, in Palácio Nacional da Ajuda, Lisbon, a series of fifty canvases painted between 2002 and 2006, connected by a single theme: the theatre. He titled it "The show is about to begin…”1

To comment on the painting in this series, which so explicitly and deliberately takes the theatre as the setting for its representation, I propose to depart from the artist’s own statements about his work in general and his way of painting.2 These will help us to contextualize and to better understand the discursive conception of representation involved in this particular series, which seems to rely on one of the main concepts of Western aesthetic tradition, mimesis, both because the theatre – the mimetic art par excellence – is these canvases’ single theme, and because, on the pretext of such exclusivity, the painting that depicts the theatre is also the one producing images that share with its model the ability to create what usually takes place in the theatre: the distance between the spectator who sees the images and the entertainment world that presents or makes them visible. It is this distance, this "hiatus” between the audience and the stage – the place where "representation” unfolds –, that will allow us to test the notion of mimesis and to consider it within the context of Manuel Amado’s most recent pictorial production.3

My analysis will be divided into two sections. The first one will focus on the references I consider crucial for understanding the artist’s pictorial discourse. The second part will examine this particular painting I have called theatrical, showing that it prompts the emergence of a discourse relying on the immediacy of "seeing” as an expression of possibility in art. This division was suggested by the statements of the painter himself, which I have titled and transcribe below:

"It was in Africa, during my military service,4 while missing my faraway realities and impelled by De Chirico, cinema, and ancient Italian painting, that I found the beginning of the path to my way of painting. Since then, the path has always been the same, my own.”

"Painting is a form of communication independent from words, without reasonings or axioms. It is made to be seen and must meet the high demands which are inherent to the act of seeing.”

(…)

"Painting, as I understand it, is the most direct way there is to represent reality, considering that reality is made by us. Without interference from words or fictions.”

"In my painting time I am only aware of the effort to find the light signals that mimic what we all know without being entirely sure of knowing it.”

(…)

"I like to paint what I see when I am calm, or rather, what I remember to have seen when I was calm, so as to try to see better, to be sure.”

1) KEY REFERENCES FOR UNDERSTANDING MANUEL AMADO’S PICTORIAL DISCOURSE

Let us begin, then, with genealogy. Manuel Amado acknowledges three sources for "the beginning of [his] path”: De Chirico, cinema, and ancient Italian painting.

The painter’s mention of De Chirico as a close influence is not the reason why the critics unanimously identify surrealist effects in his work. To make the same argument in connection with a more recent name, it is often said that his painting bears a resemblance to Edward Hopper’s, whose work, curiously enough, Manuel Amado only came to know in 1987, during a visit to the United States.5 The truth is that any viewer can easily recognize surreal sceneries (reminiscent of those in the so-called "metaphysical painting”) in the silence-laden atmosphere that Manuel Amado creates from the lighting contrasts he uses to outline places and objects, from the absence of action and life in his empty canvases (which the rare human figures, when present, only emphasize), or from the gaze he casts upon space as he separates nature from interiors, intersects axis with surfaces, draws out angles, corners, planes, vanishing points and skylines, imposing on it a geometrical order with the precision of his architect’s eye. Suspended, enigmatic, unsettling and vaguely artificial, the atmosphere created with these and other procedures (wherein there is no place for conflict or passion) shares with those early 20th-century "metaphysical” paintings a certain degree of formal purism, in line with a classical modernism – austere, depurated, and stark – that is closer to the ecstatic visualism of some symbolist painting than to the products of the avant-garde’s transgressive poetics. Other names associated with surrealism could also be added to the list of "influences”. Besides De Chirico, Magritte, for instance, would be a fitting addition, considering that Manuel Amado, as interested as him in "metaphysical places”, has also painted a series of canvases6 dedicated to reminiscences of railway stations.7 One feels tempted, therefore, to compare these with the work of the Belgian artist, but a single painting by Magritte – the widely known "La durée poignardée”, where a train juts into a room through the fireplace, charging towards the viewer – would suffice to make us realize that the parallel between the two painters begins and ends in the object "train”. In fact, we will not find in Manuel Amado’s body of work any trains-coming-out-of-fireplaces – that is to say, the metaphysical implications of Magritte’s surrealist vision (even when directed at a concern with time, as is the case in that painting) are not those of Manuel Amado’s. While the former’s preoccupations can easily adapt to the illustration of an idea (like many metaphysical implications of other surrealist painters that are so popular in the advertising world), the latter’s stop short of an idea, merely triggering a sense of "uncanny strangeness”8 which, to be fully understood, should be ascribed instead to his painting’s literalism, i.e., ultimately, to the dominant and structuring feature of his whole oeuvre – the ability to produce, in all of his painted images, "presence” effects, "stage” effects. These effects are of a sensible, physical order, they engage the senses and compel the viewer to recognize them in the object as being there to be seen (in this sense, they are comparable to certain aesthetic experiences of minimalism). Thus, we must understand that Manuel Amado’s purported "surrealism” is not so much a matter of "metaphysical reason” as it is of a tactile, sensorial effect. Which does not mean that there is not something of a surreal-metaphysical element in such effects of presentation. However, Manuel Amado’s surreality (we favour this term over that of surrealism) is, first and foremost, and this should be stressed, the sensible displaying its own intelligibility as an epiphenomenon, a matter, so to speak, of metaphysics, but one that would be better described as a "metaphysics of the theatrical presence”.9 In this sort of metaphysics, what is at stake is the dense materiality of perception, and so, in this sense, similarly to what occurs in the theatre, the surreality of Manuel Amado’s paintings, while seeming to engage us in the sheer perception of reality, phenomenologically immediate and "natural”, ends up proving to be deceptive, deviant, for it is precisely in presenting itself as "natural” and spontaneously immediate that such perception prevents us to reach the Real in its absolute and radical nakedness. In fact, we know that reality eludes that sort of immediacy, because the essence and totality of whatever it may be (that which since Plato has been called the Real) is always mediated by the conceptual construction (textual and linguistic) that organizes the whole experience of perception. Regardless of how "natural” it may seem, such experience cannot do without the systematizing abstraction of the signifying order. Besides, since perception is an act of figuration, and this in turn is temporal (it unfolds over time), the Real remains irreducible to the idea of a totalized, synchronic, everlasting and ideal presence – to an absolute. The Real is captured at each moment by the experience of time, which makes it always a possibility and never an actuality. In other words: the Real is not, but it may be. It is the possibility of a totalized experience. Thus, because there is no pure perception, and because perception is forever caught (imprisoned and detained) in an arbitrary construction, in the so-called symbolic order of language (be it image, consciousness, or thought), which in turn is always rooted in the ongoing and continuous flow of a diachrony, the phenomenological plenitude of perception remains a utopia, and therefore, the perception of the Real that the theatre and Amado’s paintings seem to offer through the supposedly literal presence of their effects is but an illusory, frustrating and artificial perception, which always falls disturbingly short of the supposedly absolute Real it aims at.

We may infer, then, that as in the theatre, what lies concealed behind the surreal literalism of Manuel Amado’s paintings is simply the possibility of the Real. As so, I would argue that, "philosophically”, what Manuel Amado depicts is that very possibility – and that, in pictorial terms, he depicts it as a shadow. In this series entirely devoted to the theatre, this is, in fact, the image-synthesis of the theatre’s essence (an essence that remains ever absent and inapprehensible). The painter represents, in these extremely beautiful silent paintings, as an umbrageous possibility, that essence (the absolute Real of the theatre). Notice how he offers us in fifty different ways an openness to the Real as a possible world. Indeed, the series is comprised of fifty paintings, which provide several angles and perspectives of the (theatre’s) Real as a field opened to a world that may be. And notice as well how the figuration that the painter has found for that possibility is, invariably, that of a closed, empty box with hollow inaudible resonances, an umbrageous and atemporal place, silent and empty, far removed from the illusion of empirical reality, and, particularly, from any psychological verisimilitude. This fiftyfold figurative variation is the as if the true and full essence of the theatre was present there (to be seen).

Let us take a closer look at the "stage” effects in this pictorial ensemble. As in other canvases from other series, these effects are rich of allegorical-surrealistic potential. Yet, one would be justified in asking what makes them so unique in comparison with those of previous works. Well, in this particular case, the effects seem to be saying that one should believe in the truth of appearances, the truth of material sensation (as in the theatre), and they even assert themselves as capable of demonstrating that the distance between the world of appearances and the world of essences (which representation endeavours to abolish at any cost) cannot be neither eliminated nor transcended and must be materialized and emphasized instead. In other words, and relying once again on philosophy: contrary to Socrates, who, in his dialogue with Glaucon in Book X of the Republic, strives to prove that images are deceptive due to their connection to the world of contingency and change, and therefore, deserve no credit at all, Manuel Amado values images and appearances precisely for the reasons advanced to condemn them in the Platonic argument.

The painter’s stance in defending and valuing the deceptiveness of images becomes, therefore, something new. All the more so since, associated as it is with "stage” effects, it clearly identifies itself with the theatre – the art that literally depends on stage effects to be art. Furthermore, the "stage” effects are also represented in the canvases as a theme. It is true that, once thematized, their power as a sensorial and physical presence recedes to a more mental (more constructed) plane, where the active "to be seen” is replaced by the more passive status of the "to see”. But, in this way, we are confronted with an interesting situation that may be summed up as follows: when the "stage” effects demand to "be seen”, they are asserting an indicial and performative physics that is characteristic of the sensorial nature of art such as Manuel Amado conceives and practises it: they are like the theatre; when the "stage” effects are represented on the canvases as a part of nature inherent to the represented object (in this case, the theatre), that is to say, when they are represented as "something to see”, they lose their claimable character as an immediate "presence” and appear instead in perspective, optically distanced, re-presented, compelling the viewer to see them as images kept at a distance, bound to a signification, to the canons of naturalness and verisimilitude. Thus, the viewer sees them as painting (which they are and have always been) and not as theatre (which they seem and want to be). We will return to this point later when discussing "perspective”, the third reason Manuel Amado provides for painting the way he does, but it becomes immediately apparent that the novelty in this pictorial series lies on the overlapping of those "theatre” effects that are simultaneously shown and told, in an ambiguous game between direct re-presentation and mediatized expression, a game that may elude the less attentive viewers, who hastily tend to see Manuel Amado’s painting as a mere conventional exercise of figurative representation of reality. To those viewers, its interest begins and ends there. But they are mistaken, as I will try to demonstrate.

The fact that the "stage” effects are represented as a theme reflects both the importance that the theatre holds within Manuel Amado’s pictorial world and the extent of his awareness as a painter/creator of effects. Indeed, the fact that the theatre is the sole theme of these fifty canvases necessarily reinforces, from an ontological point of view, the theatrical character of his painting. Firstly because the theatre is presented as if being the archetype of representation, in the broad sense of the term and thus encompassing the plastic arts in their pictorial and theatrical variants; and secondly because dramatic texts admittedly hold "(…) a particular sort of enunciation, [one that] entails the demand to be made visible”10 – an enunciation in every regard similar to the sort of enunciation/staging of Manuel Amado’s "dramatic” paintings and to the sort of demand for the effects that his painting produces as it claims an immediate vision of "presence”. When these effects of immediate presence, incorporated in his canvases as "theatre”, compel us to see them not as immediate but as constructed effects, subjected to a symbolic re-presentation, his painting becomes "thought out” by its very theme. An interesting play of mirrors is thus created, prompting us to consider the hypothesis that Manuel Amado is using the theatre as a great metaphor to comment on his own work and to tell us that, even in the art of sheer immediacy and literal presence which is the theatre, an art where gestures are subjected to a strict physical exercise of repetition, discipline and training (which is the art of the anti-representational theatre, as we shall see, and also his own art as a painter), even there, the disclosed Real is not the primordial one; this remains still and always yet to be seen, because whatever reaches us is irredeemably tinged with artificialism and fictionality.11 Now, taking the theatre as the matrix for a conception of art that pursues silence (as opposed to words) and invests on it as a way of reaching things in their absolute purity (i.e., without mediation), in their radical asemantic immanence (i.e., out of any meaning-ascribing framework, of any totalitarian representational apriorism), and knowing that the assertion of the thus conceived Real is only possible, in spite of everything, within the oxymoron rhetoric inherent to the game of "truth and staging”,12 amounts to claim a place in the discourse of contemporary art (comprised of many trends) and to have a keen critical intuition regarding their own pictorial discourse, which therefore deserves, for this sufficient reason, a place of prominent visibility among the most radical aesthetic experiences of contemporaneity, i.e., those that keep striving to get to the root of things.

The second claimed "influence” that helped Manuel Amado to find his way as a painter is cinema. He is referring to silent cinema, in which the film’s signifiers are activated within the space of the screen. This should not surprise us, since it is this type of cinema – where silence reigns and the image signifiers become physically present – that better explores the dense materiality of perception and surreality; therefore, only silent film can rival the kind of theatre represented in "The show is about to begin…”: a spectral, abstract, hallucinatory, simulated theatre – an absurd theatre, and a theatre of the absurd.

As complementary artistic practices, silent film is the double of this voiceless theatre, made only of mimic and gesture, as is well illustrated in paintings such as "Já lá está o Pantaleão” [Pantaleon is already there] (2003) and "Personagem a acenar” [Waving character] (2005), or made only of echoes and deferred voices: "Deixaram o arlequim no corredor” [They left Harlequin in the corridor] (2003), "Fechem-me essa cortina” [Draw that curtain close] (2004), "Por favor a cadeira mais para a esquerda” [Please move the chair a bit to the left] (2004), "Tirem-me daí essa cadeira” [Take that chair away] (2004). In this theatre, sounds are dislocated, ventriloquized, placed (or coming from) outside the stage. These offstage voices commenting on the "action” in the paintings as if they were not part of it ("Vejam lá se não falta nada” [Make sure there’s nothing missing], "O ensaio está muito atrasado” [The rehearsal is running very late], "A luz está muito baixa” [The light is too low], and so on) bring to mind the distinction made by Marguerite Duras between film of images and film of voices, a distinction that refers to what one sees on the screen and what one hears coming from outside the action in the screen. This desynchrony is particularly prominent in Duras’ films, where most of the time what one sees does not correspond to what one hears. In "The show is about to begin…”, the voices mean to comment on what one sees, but they are not treated the same way as the images, they come from the outside, as if they were not a part of what is represented. But in fact they are, for despite their off screen status they are still theatrical voices: it is the voice of the stage director ("Vai começar o espectáculo” [The show will begin now]), of the actor ("O ensaio está muito atrasado” [The rehearsal is running very late]), of the spectator ("Já da outra vez ficámos neste camarote” [We sat in this box last time, too]), of the scenographer ("Por favor a cadeira mais para a esquerda” [Please move the chair a bit to the left]), of the impresario ("A casa hoje vai estar cheia” [We will have a full house tonight]), of the prop master ("Cuidado não se encostem” [Mind you, don’t lean there]), of the electrician ("A luz está muito baixa” [The light is too low]), of the repertories ("A caixa de Pandora” [Pandora’s box]), of the performative genres: the commedia dell’arte ("A cara do Pierrot não me convence” [Pierrot’s face doesn’t quite convince me”), the opera ("Cenário para o 3.º acto da ópera ‘A vingança do Morgado” [Scenery for the third act of the opera ‘The Revenge of the Morgado’]), the operetta ("Cenários para ‘A canção do deserto’” [Sceneries for ‘The Song of the Desert’]), the musical ("Dizem que é o fantasma da ópera” [They say it’s the phantom of the opera]), the ballet ("E agora… ‘O lago dos cisnes’” [And now… ‘The Swan Lake’]), the pantomime ("O arlequim a fazer-se engraçado e o diabo a ver” [Harlequin clowning around and the devil watching]), the variety show ("Cenário para uma cena canalha” [Scenery for a rascal scene]), and so forth. With the choice of the titles given to each canvas, Manuel Amado is "forcing” the viewer to take part in the game of what he sees: the artist compels him to feel the situation in the acoustic space of cinema and theatre as a physical space. The viewer finds himself involved in that space; he remains implicated in what he sees in a disturbingly active way, a "surreal” way.

Many of these and other titles in the series can be read as the captions in between the scenes of a silent movie.13 These titles-captions, but also the cardboard figures posing as actors (painted in a low and lateral two-dimensionality that stresses their status as paper characters with no objective reference) and the shadows cast around them, evoke that wonderful pre-sound world of magic and unreality, calling to mind that, in its infancy, cinema was silent movement, and that one of its earliest harbingers was shadow puppetry. The intersection of cinema and theatre in this particular aspect, their overlapping or near equivalence, achieves its maximum evocative power (this time through an allusion to the reflections on the theatre by symbolist theatrical theorists) in the three final paintings of the series – "The third from last supper of the Punchinelli”, "The second from last supper of the Punchinelli” and "The last supper of the Punchinelli” –, which were deliberately exhibited in this order, side by side, so they could be read in sequence, from left to right, as if "moving” towards a cinematic THE END. More than any others in the series, these three canvases summon up the so-called "moving screens” invented by Gordon Craig to introduce stage movement in his (symbolist and motionless) theatre14 of "super-marionettes”.

Some titles in the series evoke sound cinema, particularly from the 1930s – such is the case of "O salão do conde Karlof” [Count Karlof’s parlour],15 or "Cenários para ‘A canção do deserto’” [Sceneries for ‘The song of the desert’],16 which are virtually the only allusions to sound film, as far as direct references to movies are concerned. But the "sonority” of cinema at the time when silent movies gave way to talking pictures is nevertheless present in the way Manuel Amado introduces that sonority: as a silent debate. We are made to feel this debate in the surreal presence of its main participants: Almada Negreiros and Fernando Amado. Some canvases allude, albeit in a materially invisible way, to the tensions voiced by those two artists. These tensions involved the issue of whether sound film would come to overshadow the theatre. And the answer to this question, shared by Almada and Fernando Amado, since those tensions were not intensified by irreconcilable incompatibilities, is particularly well illustrated in "A caixa de Pandora” [Pandora’s box] (which is also the title of a play by Fernando Amado),17 and "A cadeira de Jean Cocteau” [Jean Cocteau’s chair]. In the first one ("Pandora’s box”), the "noise” of such debate is metaphorically depicted in the vast and dense repertory of dramaturgical activity (but not only) that the box hints at containing. It is not just Harlequin’s mask that slips out of it: it holds a whole shapeless mass of theatre and cinema props and accessories, and there is enough room for assorted texts, scripts, titles, programs and works. That is why the box’s contents spill out and metonymically spread over to other canvases (like, for instance, the one titled "O trono de Ricardo III” [The throne of Richard III], or "Cena para ‘Cá vai Lisboa’” ["Scene for ‘Cá vai Lisboa’”]). In the second ("Jean Cocteau’s chair”), the "noise” of the debate on cinema and the theatre attains presence and "visibility” in a stance of conciliatory intelligence, as the one assumed in it by Fernando Amado (even more so than Almada), who had almost always tried to "emphasize what both have in common, as well as, on the other hand, what makes them unmistakable.” In the empty chair of the distinguished metteur-en-scène and creator of the two Orphée (the theatre play, in 1926, and the movie, in 1950), Manuel Amado creates the "invisible vision” of his father’s figure, precisely the sort of vision that the French writer had aspired to.18

But it is not only Fernando Amado who "sits” on this chair; in fact, it is all the creators who, like Cocteau, were able to play many other roles in the art world and to be many things at the same time: actors, playwrights, choreographers and scenographers, as well as poets, librettists, novelists, painters and surrealists. Ultimately, the chair will accommodate any creator that the viewer manages to "see” sitting there, as long as the art they defended and practised had relied on making the invisible visible, either in the shadows cast by the magical lights of the stage, or in the imponderable images running on the luminous screen of (silent or sound) film, it makes no difference: Shakespeare, Craig, Appia, Artaud, De Chirico, Magritte, Almada, and so many others…

In Portugal, the debate on cinema and the theatre (if indeed something worthy of that name has ever existed) never led to extreme positions, and this is also implied in "Jean Cocteau’s chair”. On the contrary, the threat looming over the aesthetics of traditional theatre at the time of the changes brought about by the arrival of sound to cinema (the late 1920s) was actually never felt as a threat but as a natural thing by those who were already committed to the type of theatre proposed by the theorists of European symbolist theatre. The "naiveté” that pervades the troupe of Columbines and Punchinelli, Pierrots and Harlequins, acrobats and puppets with which Manuel Amado populates and "enlivens” the empty stage of his representation19 is akin to these characters’ typicalness and their importance in dismantling the theatrical illusion such as we find them in Almada Negreiros’ theatre. Thus, even though Almada and Fernando Amado, who admired him, were both closer to the theatre than to cinema by affection, tradition and/or personal sensibility, one does not find anywhere in their written reflections a depreciation, dismissal, or condemnation of cinema. Which, in any case, would be contrary to the modernist spirit they championed and pursued in their work as multifaceted artists. As for the theatre they practised, both left enough theatrical material to prove that the "new, spontaneous, accessible language that charms the eye and is easy to learn by heart”20 suited their demanding projects and repertoires, and, in some cases, even helped them to achieve less hermetic and formalist results in their fight against provincialism, rhetoric excess, and cheap commercial success.

We will turn now to ancient Italian art, which, along with De Chirico and cinema, is declaredly at the base of Manuel Amado’s "own way” of painting. The painter is alluding, more specifically, to the historical legacy of Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and Alberti (1404-1472), with their studies on perspective in the 15th century. As is known, Brunelleschi set down the rules for depicting three-dimensional space within the painting’s flat surface, establishing the so-called "horizon line” with a single "vanishing point” at its centre (the privileged and ideal point, supposedly correct, to which all lines in the painting and the viewer’s gaze converge). Alberti refined Brunelleschi’s rules and developed a system of perspective that would allow him to create on canvas a "perfect” illusion of reality. To achieve this, he honed the realistic representation of light through light/shadow interplays to give objects an appearance of three-dimensionality, volume, and relief. Thus, the objects depicted on canvas became part of a story. The combined treatment of these technical requirements aimed at producing certain effects on the viewer, namely, to condition his vision and emotions. One could say that, with classical perspective, the viewer’s vision is subjected to rigid laws deriving from formal rules, and that "seeing” becomes an experience that compels the viewer to believe in what he sees, allowing himself to be carried away by the fabulation of a plot created from and around the represented objects. With Alberti, the story is at the centre of the painting and perspective is instrumental to its creation.

Now, although claiming the historical legacy of Renaissance painters by using perspective in many of his works, Manuel Amado, when defining painting and commenting on his own way of painting and its object(ive), adds a few remarks that show how, departing from perspective, he handles and explores it in a different way from the one proposed by his predecessors. He states, for instance, that reality in painting "is made by us” ("Painting, as I understand it, is the most direct way there is to represent reality, considering that reality is made by us”), thus doing away with the idea that reality has a supposedly external existence and is "there” to be painted and represented. He also states that he relies on memory to achieve a clearer vision of things that will make him "sure” of them ("I like to paint what I see when I am calm, or rather, what I remember to have seen when I was calm, so as to try to see better, to be sure”). Using memory to "try to see better” and to "be sure” is, from a classical point of view, quite unusual, to say the least. What he means, I believe, is that with memory the subject/object polarity disappears, and so does the type of figuration subjected to the reductive and analogical logic of the story being told. In memory, subject and object are indistinguishable, and the distance between reality, on one side, and the story being told (its verbal or visual counterpart), on the other, is abolished. Memory is an aesthetic perception; it is "the materiality of a body that feels in a pure act of feeling”.21 As in the theatre, memory, too, belongs to the order of the senses, it is a corporeal perception, able to apprehend the sensible and to merge with it in a plane of mutual connivance. These observations, along with the painter’s reiterated rejection of words, for these lead to fabulations that hinder the "act of seeing”22 (language betrays the "presence”), call into question the use of classical perspective such as we find it in ancient Italian painting. They challenge, right at the outset, the place of the observing subject, the place of the viewer, his gaze; they emphasize the arbitrariness of that gaze, an arbitrariness denied to the classical viewer, compelled to direct his attention to a single focal point and "forced” to accept it as the legitimate one. They challenge, too, the idea of distance, which is crucial and the very foundation of the notion of perspective. In fact, while in classical perspective the subject, separated from the object, sees things as if objectified and always in/dependent from/on him (things exist outside of him, but not without his gaze), in Amado’s statements we realize that the temptation to objectify references to an exteriority, inherited from the Renaissance, has nothing to do with his inner eye, which inscribes the plane of things into the materiality of feelings. Because objects do not primarily exist in the subject’s thoughts; they primarily exist in the subject’s memory, which is part of his body. This is how one should understand, I think, Amado’s correction to the first part of his statement, when he says: "I like to paint what I see, or rather, what I remember to have seen”. There is a difference between "what I see” and "what I remember (…)”. In "what I remember”, things are automatically placed on the same level as the body-memory; the two planes become mutually coextensive and ultimately form a single one. Only in that coextension, in that "presence”, will it be possible to create the necessary conditions for seeing "better”, because only on that plane, which is the same to both the seen object and the body(-memory) that sees it, only on that plane where there is no distance between the former and the latter, things are freed from the reflexive cogito (from the burden of judging, assessing, fictionizing), freed from perspective and representation, freed from the weight of an intelligence that is not their own. Their intelligence – the intelligence of things – simply lies on their existing as things, open to a possibility that is exclusively theirs, even though a consciousness without reflexion, a non-judgemental inner vision, like memory, may come to inhabit them.

Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), a leading theatre theorist whose aesthetic teachings coincide with the emergence of cubism, uses an eloquent metaphor to explain how a director of symbolist dramas may overcome the difficulties of adapting a text to the stage. He refers movement, light and abstraction as the pivotal elements (the guiding principles) in modern theatre – a theatre able to assert its own artistic value, its existence as a body. At a certain point in his argument, Appia resorts to the following metaphor: "(…) a woman, with the advantages of her sex and elegantly sitting on a couch, has a delightful expression. Undoubtfully: but what if she undresses and sits on a chair…? (…) her nude body seems in advance and implicitly present, and is enhanced aesthetically. (…)” Then he adds: "It is obvious that the feet of Muslims on the rugs in their mosques are shoeless and not nude; they express a religious, not an aesthetic intention.”23 In both examples, Appia emphasizes body expression, the body’s actual presence, the body with corporeal effect, and it is the stressing of this aspect that prompts me to relate "Appia’s chair”, as a proposal for a physical theatre, with the "corporeal cogito” of Manuel Amado’s recollections of seen things, for these, like the nude body of the "aesthetic” woman, or the nude feet of Muslims outside their mosques, are the sensible that demands aesthetic visibility, the sensible that expresses itself as an object that exists in and by itself, truthful to its necessity, to its individual essence, without yielding to foreign elements suggesting the representation of something else.

But let us return to "painting what I see” and "painting what I remember to have seen”. Why, indeed, does Manuel Amado feel the need to replace the first expression with the second? Because, without contradicting what has been previously argued, one must recognize that to paint what one sees is still to stop short of the object’s potential depth, to give of the represented thing merely the conditions of its possibility – to represent it imperfectly. In other words: to stop at the threshold of immediate perception, of the sensible as apprehended by the body’s intelligence, in not enough. One must move from the plane of "presence” towards the plane of representation. But this has nothing to do with representation in the classical sense. Within the dualist framework of classical representation, subject and object are separated; here, on the contrary, there is no split between subject and object – there is an elemental proximity between the two, causing them to interrelate in an "intentional” way.24 This intentionality, or reciprocity, implies that the subject is aware that he can only communicate with the object if this makes its presence to be "felt” (if it makes itself "present” to him). And he also knows that, as a subject, he only exists to the object if he manages to come to an agreement with it, demanding from himself the knowledge that allows him to approach it. That is why Manuel Amado, when describing his practice as a painter, speaks of being "aware of the effort” and of trying to find "the light signals that mimic what we all know without being entirely sure of knowing it.” He recognizes that, on his part, as the subject, there is a knowledge that he himself must look for and demand of himself to be revealed, for this is the knowledge that will lead him to the object and allow him to communicate with it (a matter of the subject as belonging to the object, or of the painter to the painting, or of the actor to the character). In its turn, the object is made present through "light signals”, the same ones that the subject must be able to find within himself so as to make them visible, for only then the object will have a possibility of existence and expression (a matter of the object as belonging to the subject, or of the painting to the painter, or of the character to the actor).

However, representative mediation is necessary as a means for the subject to communicate with the object and to reveal its signification, its visibility. Representation is a process of conferring intelligibility to the immediacy of presence, to the connaturality between subject and object. It is, malgré tout, a necessary procedure, because it accords visibility to the relationship subject-object, based on their fundamental proximity. What happens is that, once the procedure is set in motion, it should be able to disappear, establishing a new immediacy, a new interconnection between subject and object, reinscribing the subject in another dimension – a new intimacy – of the object.

In the same poem, Cesário also speaks of the "retouched canvases of memory”:

a surprising expression, if one considers the coinciding points of view, for Manuel Amado also states that the object of his painting is not exactly what his eyes see, but rather the mental image that his memory allows him to see.

2) THE IMMEDIACY OF THE THEATRICAL "SEEING” AS AN EXPRESSION OF POSSIBILITY IN ART

What better space of expression to designate that sort of knowledge than the theatre(‘s)? But one should be cautious: what space and what theatre are these? As it should be clear by now, we are not talking about the sort of theatre that presents itself as a reproduction of the world or of emotions, an idealized space of life, presenting itself to the viewer as a revealed truth, a space capable of setting in order men, nature and society, with a corrective or disciplining function and the practical purpose of solving social, psychological, moral (or other) conflicts, a theatre endowed with dramatic depth, or, quite simply, a space for entertainment. We are talking instead of a theatre that presents itself as a pure and autonomous space and brings into the limelight its literality, technically as well as aesthetically.

Thus, the invisible theatre is made visible as a physical place by way of its signifiers. Through the mediation of these, the scenic space (stage and wings) highlights the theatre’s primordial plasticity, its physicality, materiality, concreteness, and technique. The whole scenic space and its surroundings – including actors, spectators, stage director, playwright, the text itself (also present, like the other elements in this pictorial series, in the paintings’ titles), stalls, boxes, aisles, sets, props, lighting, etc. – become the expression-space of an obvious literality (Artaud would say a "cruel” literality: "theatre is as bloody and as inhuman as dreams”), a space that concurs with that of the immediate literality and spontaneity of life, but is not indistinguishable from it – it is merely concurrent, contiguous to it, a space-expression that runs side by side, and in syntony, with "Man, Society, Nature, and Objects”.

In aesthetic terms, this literality is expressed, not represented. It is expressed and it expresses, which presupposes a deep communion between subject and object, and the disclosing of a double signification, the subject’s and the object’s. Expression, which is always the expression of a feeling, is enmeshed in the thing that expresses. The resulting knowledge is structured as an interiority, and therefore it is always relatively frustrating and frustrated (as Manuel Amado puts it: "what we all know without being entirely sure of knowing it”), always resisting ascriptions of meaning and eluding the rigidity of representation. Some regard such knowledge as a mystery. Others name it "uncanny strangeness”. Others still, like Manuel Amado himself, define it – and feel it – as an "uncertainty”. Whatever it may be, there is something essentially unfathomable about this knowledge, something that no exegetic or representational effort can ever unveil. The mystery involved in this type of knowledge will always remain undecipherable, inapprehensible.

Just like in Henry James’ short story "The Figure in the Carpet” (1896). The story tells of a young literary critic who sets out in a tireless quest to unravel the "secret” in the work of a much-admired author. Despite the young reader’s total and obsessive commitment to the task, he does not succeed in discovering the secret. James’ "figure in the carpet” may serve as a metaphor for the aesthetic knowledge of form as a relentless search for something that will never be made visible (presentifiable) – especially since, as that "figure” suggests, the secret is embedded and concealed in the very making of the carpet, in the way it is "manufactured”, that is, in the very materiality, texture and craft (or technical knowledge) involved in the weaving process, which makes it simultaneously present and absent, effaced. The secret is "there”, but never entirely accessible to the expression of a visibility. The secret – and one might equally call it mystery, strangeness, uncertainty, surreality – expresses (and is expressed in) that very inaccessibility.

In Manuel Amado’s invisible theatre there is something akin to Henry James’ "figure in the carpet”. The images depicting the sort of theatre that the painter makes visible express remnants or traces of an ever-elusive essence. They are doubles, or shadows, for which the original is always a possibility.