For a Theory of /mountain/

Eduardo Veras

 

In 1972, Hubert Damisch created his theory of cloud. He wanted to oppose the art historians who attempted to indicate a univocal – certain, absolute – in all that was repetition, like an allegory or an icon, in different paintings throughout the times. Instead of solving the riddle (and devouring the sphynx), the French philosopher preferred to treat the figurative elements that appeared in the paintings as “symptoms”, always diverse and always renewable. Hence his appreciation of clouds. The clouds, more than any other painted motif, fit this kind of intuitive speculation: sometimes they suggest the alliance between the earthly and the divine worlds; sometimes they reproduce ecstasy; in other cases, miracles; with some luck, imagination itself. They can also remind us of the infinite, the unknown, the invisible. Clouds manage to lend some shape to what is shapeless; they manage to represent, therefore, what cannot be represented, the inapprehensible.

Maybe it was the case of imagining a theory not identical to this one, bus somewhat similar, adjacent, to the mountain. Or /mountain/ (Damisch puts his /cloud/ between slashes, signaling not exactly a volatile suspension, but first the interest in its condition as a sign, and not the ‘actual’ cloud). The mountain, according to this logic, would not have to necessarily mean something that insists in staying still, far away: the unswerving and solid mountain; the insurmountable and motionless mountain.

Beyond its weight, its wholeness and its lack of movement, the mountain will present other symptoms to anyone willing to contemplate it. Not by chance, it is precisely a mountain that defines one of the first recognizable landscapes in the History of Art: in the retable of 1444 representing the encounter between Saint Peter and Jesus Christ after the Resurrection, the French Konrad Witz painted Mount Salève in the background, with Lake Geneva in front, passing as the Tiberias Sea.

The mountain there provides a counterpoint to the transparency of the waters on the first plane and echoes the hierocratic affirmative character of Christ covered with the red robe. The mountain has yet another function: Gombrich invites us to imagine how touching it must have been for the Genevan faithful – contemporary to Witz – the luck of recognizing their own town in the Biblical scene of the miraculous fishing.

Of course, there would be an infinity of other mountains to list, as famous or even more, as that one. The ones Caspar David Friedrich painted, for example, are usually described as symbols of the German Romanticism, at the same time mystic and idealist, tormented and entrancing. However, wouldn’t there be in those mountains something undecipherable? Or even illegible? For the sake of this argument-question, in one of Friedrich’s most well-known landscapes, the mountain in the background – bundled by a series of other mountains and observed from the top of a cliff on the first plane – almost submerges under a cluster of, precisely, clouds (The Wanderer above the Mists, c. 1818). Even the sublime dissipates.

Closer, there is the brown mountain by Carlos Scliar, which occupies almost the entire painting, both vertical and longitudinally. Under a mass of red skies, the mountain becomes provocation and politics. In careful block letters, copied in stencil, it proclaims: ‘I am a painted mountain. And you?’ (Landscape XXV, from 1973).

All of these arguments, this compliment to the mountain, are related to the most recent series of drawings by Guilhereme Dable. The image of the mountain does not appear in every drawing, but its presence – punctual and indelible – reconfigures the entire setting. The artist states that this apparition was by chance. The drawings followed in the path of the previous works: based on observation notes, Dable juxtaposed the most abstract portion of everything he collects daily in his image files: the encounters among straight and curve lines, between lines and planes, the edges that appear in any corner, the corners themselves and their angles, the angles and their perspectives. He subjected to tension, as usual, different materials and distinct solutions: the abrupt hard cutting of the duct tape and the light paint soaked in water, concealed and running; the transparencies and the opacities; the oil and the graphite; the dry pastel and the beeswax; the white of the paper and the solid black. Amidst that, in one of the drawings, in the left inferior corner, below a pink and black mix, with overlapping planes and melting blues, the outline of a mountain appears. The author embraced this image. With graphite, a classic material for constructing the drawing, he thoroughly sketched the different volumes of the mountain. Dable still kept in his memory the lively impression of the mountains that accompany the salt deserts in Bolivia. Photographs and notes taken in that trip were revisited and served as reference for the next drawings.

These mountains are not mere synonyms for solidity and immobility. Mainly because they seem to move along the papers. They combine with geometry and unfold in different volumes (Cézanne’s lesson). They embrace the solid and the angles from the previous series. They modulate the gray of the graphite. The representation of the mountains, in this case, subvert the pattern of reading that those compositions started to suggest. Just like a manifestation of a symptom, the /mountain/ dislodges the understandings that the admirer of those drawings believed he/she had found.