Criticism of art sparked António Areal into a prolific written production, but it was above all used as a method of artistic creation. An early interest in deconstructing images in his work, would lead him to choose systematically the visual motives of boxes and cubes for his pictorial representations and to build three-dimensional objects. These experiences would ultimately reach a peak in António Areal’s exhibit at the Galeria Quadrante in Lisbon (1969), where he presented this box alongside nine other identical ones, either emptied out or with minute forms, but in all cases accompanied by long aesthetic or philosophical titles.

Paisagem: no primeiro plano uma casa numa colina. Ao fundo, no lado direito, chove copiosamente [Landscape: a house on a hill in the foreground. On the right side of the background, it rains copiously], in its suggestive discord between title and content, stands as a chief event in Areal’s long and provocative reflection on artistic categories and on language as a form of visual expression. Framing the void also allowed to erase any trace of authorial presence, as there was no formal invention or handling of materials, thereby leaving the work as a receptacle for what the onlooker might care to project – as the “spiritual exercises” Areal intended them to be. For a moment then, his neo-figurative and abstract experiences were transferred onto immaterial art, with a crucial precedent in Yves Klein’s work, whom in his historic exhibition Le Vide [The Void] (1958) had decided to empty out a whole gallery in Paris, leaving only a glass box with nothing inside. Albert Camus then wrote, “avec le vide, les pleins pouvoirs”.*

 

* “With the void, comes total empowerment.” Note written on the gallery’s visitors’ book.

 

 

AR

 

 

February 2011