19/10/2018
Seven Layers of Solitude - Introduction by Kári Páll Óskarsson.
Artistic cooperation always poses a certain risk. Artists who perhaps assumed that a certain reciprocal understanding existed between them might then later discover that, when push comes to shove, their artwork is essentially incompatible.The collaboration might give rise to rousing creative tension, but it is more likely to simply run its course, run dry, and the artists fail to establish the necessary communion that characterizes all shared artistic ventures, leaving the work without any marker of significant interchange; birthing instead some kind of bastardized monstrosity or mongrel headed nowhere, or the mission is altogether aborted. In artistic endeavours that seem collaborative by their very nature, such as in pop music, it might come to light that a certain band member had in fact been the driving force all along, subjugating others to his will. Successful collaborative literary projects, like the novels of the Italian Wu Ming (previously Luther Blissett) probably count as an exception to the aforesaid. However, this collaborative difficulty is hardly a surprise in a world where the logic of competition reigns supreme and infects all levels of existence, instead of cooperation; a society in which the Individual is the alpha and omega. And only a few are willing or even capable of transcending the microscopic frame of the isolated subject.
Maybe the process is made less strenuous if the artists work separately, each with their own medium. The present book, Seven Layers of Solitude, is a great example of precisely such a fruitful collaborative effort. Lilian penning the words, Guerra sketching the images, both journeying toward the same destination, with provisions shared along the way.
Both artists have managed to curb individualism in a way where the text and the image jointly rear a rare phenomenon, namely, conversation. It is even tempting to claim that between them flows a captivating dialectic where distinctly different elements swerve passed contradictions and manage to avoid internal struggles. Instead, the two reinforce one another.
An obvious shared passion for old European art movements, such as symbolism and surrealism, certainly doesn’t hurt either. A passion which, at least in the case of Lillian’s texts, brings postwar continental philosophy to bear, as well as echoing ideas of its 19th and early 20th century forbearers, and no less their radical contemporary heirs. And even though Lillian’s writings are couched in philosophy and canonical literature, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they speak only to the intellect, nor do they ground themselves on some previously established sense. His opaque lyricism is much rather structured through a rigorous form of non-sense, a para-rationality, which evokes otherworldly onerous experiences that take place in parallel dimensions still very much our own, all threaded by a rhythm that emulates the intonations of the unconscious. Everything here revolves around the cadence of the far-sounding unconscious, sung into being through arcane chants. Moreover, Lillian’s writings emphasize - as should be clear to anyone who wanders through the labyrinths of the sentence structure - that language itself is an object, no less than the contents language is set to mediate. As is indeed the case in most worthwhile contemporary poetry.
Without wanting to give the artist’s nationality any particular precedence, it is though safe to assert that Rui Guerra’s images bear fine witness to Portugal’s history of illustration. It has sometimes been argued that the arts in small nations have a tendency to develop in diametrical opposition to their larger neighbours within the same geolinguistic region (Belgium, Austria, etc.), where the larger nation is more likely to be in possession of richer quantities of symbolic capital, placing it consequently in position to define the hierarchy of the arts, the artworld’s pecking order of forms. Smaller nations choose to differentiate themselves by focusing instead on genres, forms and even subject matters that are sometimes deemed as having less symbolic value. Spain’s art history is of course a far-extending procession of famous painters, whereas in Portugal it is the fine strokes of the pencil, rather than blurry blobs of paint, that have received admiration and gained cultural prominence. Portuguese book design and illustration are some of the world’s most exquisite.
Guerra’s enigmatic drawings depict anthropomorphic animals and other chimerical beings amidst dream-like landscapes, travelling through eerie forests and across clearings littered with dry shrubs, and consist of sharp, short lines so delicate that they sometimes come across as engravings or even etchings. Like Lillian, Guerra mines blood-red gemstones from the dark caves of early 20th century modernism; associations drift to Une Semaine de bonté by Marx Ernst, or even to the works of Alfreð Flóki, in the Icelandic context, from which the present author hails. Some might resist these comparisons, however; those readers suddenly consumed with a strange sense of having been catapulted into a world built by some macabre children’s book! Nevertheless, the ways in which Guerra’s work merges the haunting and the naive should inoculate the work against hasty interpretations.
Image and word set off with their own provisions but ultimately journey together, in solidarity, and become the duo’s joint Pincer movement that envelops the imaginative faculties, lulling and stirring the reader with their incantations, their cryptic concoctions. Is it maybe more appropriate to liken their collaboration to a mysterious potion? One brewed from a rare composition of ingredients and an assortment of alchemical materials, which they stir in turn in a bubbling, menacingly-sized cauldron? What is in the beverage offered to the protagonist by the Komodo dragon in the first text? In order to find out, perhaps it is best to tread directly through the doors of the impossible building, empty the glass in one swift gulp and proceed courageously along the hallways, and absorb the mystifying curiosities that find you along the way.
