Can a story be told within these sceneries empty of characters, this desert of walls in a desert of time? This is such an easy question to answer, that…
It so happens that, in this painting of evidence, something hides from the viewer, like a set trap extending itself into infinity. An endless painting, it could then be said, going beyond its transposed appearance, made of three walls in perspective, which the painter knows how to suggest, having learned it as an architect. In front of the painting, even if the vanishing point were to move from side to side, the space is closed, by the nature of its figuration: while, behind its painter, the open space circulates, full of invisible people, trees, hills and seas, lights and sounds, all that nature the scenery ignores or refuses – being metaphysical, as if the painter had created it so. But did he create it, or has the scenery created itself?
The answer one might, at the beginning, possibly imagine easy becomes now extremely complicated – as befits all answers to all questions images may ever carry, over the time that may pass over them. How different the time of the painting and the time of the viewer can be…
Let us say, then: metaphysical painting. Does this description apply (and in what way) to the paintings Manuel Amado creates? As it is known, that is the name given by art history to an early 20th century form of painting whose symbolic character metaphorically counteracted the physical and metamorphic adventure of Cubism; it developed in Italy, alongside a Futurism that explored the middle ground between the two extremes. In it, monumental squares with arcades and dead statues, soulless mannequins and bodiless geometries questioned imaginary fate, as a sleepwalker named De Chirico strolled among invented characters. The fact that he invented them, however, put into question the metaphysical quality of his discourse, which would become meaningless without them – symbolically contenting itself with a literary process of little historical depth. History (both art history and the history of our rapport with all image systems) has necessarily a different depth, never reducible to any contentment, but rather to a state of, shall we say, magical suspension.
An empty scenery, seemingly waiting for whatever may come to it, be it a dramatic prospect or some other event, is what it is and, by being so, detaches itself from the figurative action of whoever observes, adopts or invents it.
The metaphysic here is its own, just as the evidence it offers: it does not come from any aesthetic classification, i.e. the product of an exterior mental process, but from its own internal category. That is why the painting’s technique is smooth, impersonally serene, with an even, angular light, in its sufficient appearance – as if the painter intended to add nothing to the image born of himself, to the simplicity (as could not be otherwise) of its scenic elements. He sees the values surrounding him already in painting terms, as if they were born as painting. A painting is born like that because it was born: this painter is no visionary, but there is so much evidence in this painting…
This is what is good and bad about it: good, for those who look at the painting as something a painting always is and must be; bad, for those who want to add to it something it needs not. The metaphysics of Manuel Amado’s painting is in itself, not in poetic or philosophical adjunctions, via symbolisms of literary precision. This is, indeed, a well and truly innocent painting. Then, one can tell, from inside it, whatever stories one may please, the invention of which will be far from innocent – as all inventions are.
Or else let us look, one by one, at these curious interiors Manuel Amado has patiently painted with precise moods: building stairs, living or sitting rooms, a bedroom caught unawares (someone is in it, yes, but that person is absent in sleep) or a beach at the uncertain hour of not being it yet, or of having ceased from being it – basically a question, then, of an even exterior lighting, within the limits of the painting, where the sea is just a background and a limit to our gaze.
Surely, there will be plenty of stories to tell, among all those places of entering and exiting, in a strip of images chasing one another; we will only have to follow their trail: someone climbs up a flight of stairs, disappears into a curve and enters, invisible, the living room, then goes through the corridor, climbs up to the terrace, leans from the balcony. An anxious lover, a fugitive Fantomas? Let us instead look at these windows, which open themselves beyond all made-up narratives. Are they not the ones on which every possibility of connecting the inside and outside of that unimpeachable space rests? The glass cancels the separation which the eye ignores, passing us through, as if what is not were actually here and there at once. The painter opens the window via a cunning use of perspective, and it makes no difference; or he shuts it to achieve the same effect of indefinite space and never-linear time.
After that, what interest can there be in what may take place between useless people and characters, lost or found in their dramas? To invent an answer to that, in this desert and this equally empty time, would be to fall in the trap that is the facility of all stories. Let us, then, accept the non-stories that invisibly inhabit everyone’s silent space and suspended time – when we are offered evidences for the spectator’s eye to explore, in a properly, irreducibly metaphysical painting …