How does one tell a story in painting without turning it into a mere instrument? How does one tell a story that is painting, that gives body to the possibilities, to the interrogations, to the thinking that constitute the field of painting in the first decades of the twentieth century?

Entrada [Entrance] attempts an answer to these questions. A good one. On the one hand, it incorporates a series of signs which can be read as a reference to the “entrance” of the United States of America and Portugal into the First World War, including the episode of the staggering accusation of espionage that, in this context, befell Sonia Delaunay (an episode in which Amadeo was strongly involved, being the main responsible for her defense). This episode dates from April 1916, when a denouncer assured, in exchange for a 3000 franc reward, that Sonia Delaunay was sending encrypted messages to German submarines located along the Atlantic by way of her renowned “simultaneous discs”. And indeed one discovers, in Amadeo’s painting, the tower and the periscope of a submarine with the German colours – both framed by the ray of light that sprouts from the centre of the composition –, and the suggestion of an interior, illuminated by an electric Wotan lamp and separated from the nocturnal darkness by the horizontal lines of  gold-coloured shutters.  Also present are the coloured discs which, following Robert Delaunay’s orphic investigations, both Sonia and Amadeo had incorporated in their paintings. And even the numbers which Amadeo inscribes on the top of the canvas appear to allude to the amount awarded to the accuser. Finally, returning to the central ray of light, there is the profile of the transatlantic Lusitania – identifiable through the colours of the national flag painted over a rectangle of encrusted glass –, with its four imposing towers (two of them painted, the others suggested by the number 2), sunk by a German submarine, in a tragic episode that triggered the USA’s military intervention in the War.

On the other hand, and decisively, these fragments-elements do not compose a simple account. They are part of a work that also takes in a considerable collection of other elements: signs which can hardly be deciphered in the context of the episodes already mentioned, but recurring in the works of Amadeo more closely related to the legacy of Cubism (the guitar, still lifes, stenciled signs, collage); they are part of a work that is, above all, a painting. This means that Amadeo, though he does not dispense with the possibility of telling stories, remains within the essentially pictorial dimension of painting.

In this painting the surfaces, techniques and textures in which the colours acquire density (through impasto or even the mixture of sand into the paint) vary within a logic of accumulation that doesn’t leave any void and that allows, furthermore, for cuts, overlays and concealments of these surfaces. The positive relations and the oppositions which surfaces and signs establish between themselves brings us, like most of the paintings of the final period of Amadeo’s life, to the idea of the assimilation of Cubism not as style, but as an open interrogation of the meaning and possibilities of representation and painting.

Joana Cunha Leal