This collage-painting maintains a connection to popular culture which characterizes the majority of Amadeo’s works. Between other works of the same period (1917), Máquina registadora [Cash Register] distinguishes itself through the representation it proposes: it establishes the motive – the “cash register” which gives the painting its name – not only in the centre of the representation, but also in the centre of the action it articulates. This action involves the profiled figure drawn on the top left-hand corner and another to which the robotic arm, animated by Delaunayian discs, belongs. As we are confronted with a cash register, it is legitimate to presume that the action will imply some sort of commercial exchange and presupposes the agreement and acceptance of the laws of the market, which stipulate not the name of things, but their exchange value.

With this in mind, we can recognize in Cash Register at least two legitimate levels of reading. The first identifies the primacy of the referent and classifies this work as a representation, without underestimating the force of painting or the subversive trait of collage. Thus, this reading heightens the fragmentation and the intersection of the other pictorial planes, the different textures the paint acquires on these surfaces, the importance of the play of stenciled numbers and letters (but this time we do not find the stenciled “signature” of the artist), the recurrence of the motif of the Wotan lamp and the use of collage and mirrors cut into small rectangles – of which the most visible appears where we would expect to find the detailed features of the profile of the hypothetical buyer. It would, in addition, notice two relatively large areas covered in white paint, through which Amadeo introduces a kind of play between voids, apparent shapes of non-painting within painting itself (and there is, indeed, a third shape, corresponding to the register’s paper roll).

The second level of reading is more conjectural, for it remembers, beginning with this prosaic motive, that the commercial metaphor evokes, as well, part of the very etymological root of the word “representation”: a term which also assigns the idea of “complete equivalence”, like the one presumably established between money and an acquired good when one assumes that money represents the exact value of what is bought. Cash Register shows us, thus, that the capacity for analyzing the processes of significance associated to the vanguards that preceded the First World War (and particularly to the revolution of techniques of collage) does not force us to discard the reference towards the ‘real’ world. This world remains alive and relevant to the production of meaning because, as Amadeo knew, there are many ways of dislocating and questioning the hegemonic place that mimetic illusionism had assigned it, of which not all imply an ashamed retreat.

Joana Cunha Leal