Bruno Dunley

It had been clear to me – since that first encounter – that there was much more than a ‘Tuymans effect’ to Dunley: first, there was a tradition of Brazilian painting that transpired through his works – from Alfredo Volpi to Rodrigo de Andrade and Paulo Pasta – and, there was a notable mastery in intertwining – and articulating –the pictorial dimension of the plane and the potent imagery of the schematic.

Bruno Dunley is a painter with an interest for schemes, diagrams, cave paintings. His oeuvre contains a fascinating repertoire of diagrams, wisely filtered through the thickness of pictorial imagery, sometimes as if the matter, which in painting makes the image, suspended in a limbo – in other words: un/worked – everything that the image’s schematic backbone can achieve in painting. Thus, in the fortune of this newfound neutrality – in fact a state of imminence – scheme and painting are presented within the extraordinary drama of their own poetic, generative tensions.

I have found a very special fruition – a pleasure – in Dunley’s works, in the extent to which they have been brought to a difficult state where something may – or may not – happen in the image, still seemingly remaining within the category of entelechy . ‘Pleasure is never resting’ – wrote Ramón Gaya, a painter who chose marginality amidst modernity. The word entelechy denotes, in Aristotle’s secular lexicon, that which makes the possible unravel abreast other things possible, potentiality’s possibility, something like the potentiality – in state of reserve – of potentiality itself.

Dunley’s works – including those from his first phase where he seemed to seek the silence of image – emphasize these tensions. In this sense, what constitutes the image in painting – a complex truth that we have known with absolute clarity since Velázquez – is not image itself, as much as it is something that will come to happen within it. This opening towards the future of figurability , this imminence of figures incarnating one of their possible forms within the avatar of their perception, this parturient instability of image in relation to its future – this state of things to come in an image – is something that painting is capable of embodying with specific differentiation, perhaps better than other mediums that are more faithful to contemporary real time .

On the occasion of the last São Paulo Biennial and in the context of Sofia Borges’ installation, Dunley exhibited a painting that seduces as much as it intrigues me: its image represents the diagram conceived by Alfred Barr as a means of explaining historical destinies of modern abstraction. It is a widely known diagram that has been reproduced thousands of times and commented upon ad infinitum: it is, if you will, the scheme of the Modern Canon itself. In this work, Dunley (un)precisely transforms – or, I would rather say: ransfigures – Barr’s drawing into an abstraction. Ironically enough, but not only that: we all know that no painting can exhaust in its own image. In Dunley’s painting, the diagram’s schematic vectors appear loose, without names, adrift, against a tumultuous mauve background. In his more recent work – including some of the pieces presented in this exhibition – the vectors seem to sustain festive, serpentine circular forms – Dunley’s signature . Abstraction’s drift is a game that can only be played with the emancipation of not having to carry the weight of the world’s representation on one’s shoulders.

Around 1980, the great philosopher Gilles Deleuze asked what painting’s legacy to philosophy would be. His enigmatic answer, was the following: the concept of the diagram, the notion of the pictorial diagram. For Deleuze, the diagrammatic dimension of painting is achieved through stains and strokes, rather than through colors and lines, as is the case of Dunley’s works. Yet, and above all, Deleuze saw in the diagram – in the scheme, or in the cave painting, which never ceases to go to the farthest reach of the future , according to Merleau-Ponty’s powerful sentence – the possibility of undoing likeness with an emancipated hand. A freed hand, capable of producing an image without likeness – thus deconstructing the frugal binary between abstraction and figuration: an image that, in undoing likeness without abandoning the ‘figurative’ would have the erratic privilege of just being an image-that-presents-itself, an image in the presence, an image un-worked by the presence that comes within it.

 

Kantor, Jordan. “The Tuymans Effect: Wilhelm Sasnal, Eberhard Havekost, Magnus von Plesse”, Artforum , November 2004. ↑

No matter how strange the framing, there was usually a figure or an element that centred the scene, the surface of the painting. The colours were generally faded, and the attention was focussed on the conditions of presenting a hyper-processed image. Questions also came up at that time about the material properties of what was being seen and about the limits of vision, of observation, because the image was fleeting, blurred, in muted tones. What seems to have changed since then is that the focus – from the realisation of the work to how the viewer experi­ences it – has shifted from the result to the process of producing the painting. Since 2014 or 2015, it’s the making of the work that stands out, or better, what is seen is the course of the painting, the painting in process.

But that’s not all. Now, the work no longer seems to be aimed at constructing a predetermined, integral image that is clearly outlined, or even recognisable, as it did before. On the contrary, the process has started to comprise varying degrees of the indeterminate. And, beyond that even, the constitution of the painting has started to include various and sometimes conflicting processes, with figures and actions overlapping.

BRUNO DUNLEY I see that, too. The work since 2015 has been directed towards a freedom, a flow, something in the sense of what Alexandre called a turning point. And I think the earlier production, from 2009 to 2013, had something of that procedure in it of putting down a thick layer of paint, scraping it and interfering with it.

AW There were about three procedures…

BD ... that appeared in the paintings every now and then. But I think the main point is that in the course of making the paintings there is a kind of separation between my impulse to make, in what I want from and think of the work, and the result of the painting. In the work made between 2012 and 2013, it’s clear to me that there was something missing, a great disconnection between what I wanted the works to be and the results. There was a relationship between the faded colour and that thicker material that could silence the recognisable images that identify the world, but what I realised then was that instead of creating a silence that could widen our perception of time, those paintings produced something mute and sterile. Noticing this sterility in the work created a desire in me for movement and displacement. I reflected on the possibility of reaching a greater chromatic potency that wouldn’t carry such a codified narrative of colour. I wanted to experiment with colour to invent a narrative.

I started researching a series of chromatic experiments from throughout the Middle Ages, the illuminated manuscripts etc., and dedicated myself to painting and drawing on paper. This practice, which I began in 2015, created a freedom in terms of the ease of the medium, the scale, in being able to rip up and throw away. I think I still carry a few things from that previous process. But, in partially eliminating the figurative model that was structuring the composition and suggesting a means of interpretation, the work risked falling into a void and having no place. You start dealing with an idea of abstract painting that is very complex, very spent. How is it possible to construct images without referencing images? With painting coming to the foreground the methods and the processes start to become more relevant, but an image is still being formed.

AW But I see that for a while you still maintain these two ways of starting the paintings: sometimes starting from a more recognisable figure, other times letting the painting be more prominent in the process.

JAR Yes, I said there was a change, but I didn’t mean a complete break. Because certain characteristics remain, they turn up here and there. For example, striving to completely fill the surface, structuring the painting around a strong central motif… Aside from that, I think the painting is much freer, which, for me, is evident in the series Bestiário [Bestiary], which the Dilúvio [Deluge] paintings are a part of.

BD Bestiário also comes from the Middle Ages imaginary that I started working closely with in 2014, through the illuminated manuscripts. In that series, I think the sense of freedom grew to such an extent that it caused other problems for me, because until that point I had always tried to find a balance, so as not to go too far. If you go over the top, if you stretch the rope too far, you’re left with something kind of undefined. So, it’s an ongoing conflict – to find some measure between freedom and restraint, especially in the pictorial gesture. The idea of the gesture is still an open question.

The gesture in the history of modern and contemporary abstract painting is the protagonist in a narrative of conflict between the expression and negation of a lyrical subject. I don’t believe that art is made to express absolute freedom of will, but at the same time it happens through the artist’s desire and their attempt to capitalise on a thought, a thing, an expression. The Dilúvio paintings are unfolding of these conflicts, which have been ongoing since the work began, in 2006. So, what I am trying to understand is the possibility of expanding the pictorial experience so that it isn’t led by expressive gesture alone, but also by other ways of making that are just as worn-out. This idea of expansion is important to me. It’s still vague, under construction, but it is moving towards introducing an experience of dislocation, of transformation, of expansion, in terms of perception. Creating a reflection on the relation­ship between our body and the painting and the world we live in.

Bestiário was the most illustrative point of my career and I wasn’t afraid of taking an iconography from imagin­ed worlds, from psychological fears and mobilising my work in that territory. The concerns I had before about gesture, about what painting is, of what it can be and how it has been positioned in our time created a tension between the experience of my body and a culture inherited from my education. This conflicting relationship with a culture that was constructed, approved and sanctioned by a portion of society was dissolved and introjected int0 the work. In 2016, when I started the series, Brazil was going through a complicated period which changed the paradigms in the country’s social structure. Our social pact was broken by a coup d’état orchestrated by the National Congress, the Judiciary, and by a significant portion of the press and business and of civil sectors in society, which illegitimately toppled the then President of the Republic, Dilma Roussef. That still hasn’t been resolved; it’s still a difficult subject in our society.

What emerged from this was a state of fragility, an antidemocratic spirit and societal disgust that, through a great national agreement and breaches of the constitution itself, threw the social pact in the bin. I started to look at questions about painting, about being an artist and think, “Man, what kind of problems are these?”. Society was and is going through such a sudden and brutal change that these questions took up a different space within me. The 2016 coup was so absurd that this sense of freedom accelerated and firmly installed itself in my work. In a way, I tried to deal with the turbid side of what humans are capable of by producing something terrifying and disgusting, but, even though I produced works that I really like, I think I failed. That issue isn’t some­thing that can be addressed and challenged through my language.

AW Bestiário also plays an interesting role in what we are talking about. Beyond everything you just said, I also see these paintings as the formulation of something that has always gone with you: a kind of presence of discomfort, of unpleasantness in your work. In the book, in a conversation with Cadu, you talk about something “slightly nauseous”, referring to that yellow monochrome (made in 2010), which I think is a manifestation similar to the idea expressed in Bestiário and in the paintings in this exhibition (Virá, 2020). It’s as though this will, that has shown itself in different aspects over time, is always close by. It’s clear that all the triggers you just mentioned exist – and the trigger doesn’t always define the places a work can go once it’s finished, right? If the coup triggered these works, they can also reach many other places, different to those they started from. In a way, I think this series kept you close to the idea of unpleasantness that I was talking about. Saying that, what do you understand by discomfort when looking at your work?

BD Discomfort is a good word, because terms like “strange”, “unpleasant” or “violent” have already come up for me. When I started painting, I wanted to be a metaphysical artist who worked with intimate colour, the expansion of time, a kind of slowing down of the urban and media experience. I admired artists with those characteristics, but in my practice I started discovering that I wasn’t that type of artist. So, the first discomfort was realising that I wasn’t a metaphysical artist, of visual repetition, but an artist of variation, and this, in the context of my training and what I idealised, was uncomfortable. That has been the case since my first solo exhibition, Os nomes [The names], in 2010, but what was at stake was understanding that variation as a construction of a poetics, of a place that passed through meta-painting and that said something about the condition of painting.

I perceive this discomfort in a few ways. One is in this variation that repeats itself in the exhibitions. I really value the autonomy of each painting, the fact that each one of them has a body, a physicality, an autonomy of language. But putting them in an exhibition space with other paintings, which also have their own autonomy and difference, caused confusion, discomfort. The variation in the appearance of the paintings caused a conflict that interested me. I understand conflict as a field with two possibilities: dialogue or war. Both have a political aspect. I think I went down that path within the work, in the relationships between the paintings, between the exhibitions, and that was stimulating and at the same time uncomfortable. It isn’t anymore. It’s beginning to settle and to assert itself.

JAR We’ve been talking until now about changes the work has gone through in 10 years of Bruno’s career, and I was reminded of a few adjectives often attributed to his work, which, according to these classifications, is heterogeneous, diverse, plural. There’s a reason for that, certainly. But I also think that this variety of images, solutions, gestures and processes doesn’t mean eclecticism. There is a lot of working out in this multiplicity, of something attempted; a spirit of testing many possibilities.

With that, the idea of a collection of images has accompanied the progression of Bruno’s production since the beginning – the idea that the work comes from collections of images, whilst at the same time, through his decisions, it creates a collection of images. This collection, in a sense, anticipates not only figures, but also the reasoning, the ways of thinking. It hints at the fact that the work results, in part, from studies of various images that go beyond the field of art.

So, in fact, there were always big differences between one painting and another every time the work was shown together. Now, these differences, or what which you described as “conflict”, appear in the same work. Today, every painting is more composite than before – sometimes, as I said, apparently contradictory motifs and processes emerge side by side on the same canvas.

Another aspect of this variety informs the erudite nature of the work – cultured, studied, enlightened. But not because it makes direct references to other artists, but because it internalises an interest in the history of art and seems reinvigorated, even, in the study of that discipline. What I want to say is that there are obvious conflicts here with certain works, with certain artists, but also with the history of art.

But, returning to the question, it’s interesting to think about the plural character of the work, considering also that Bruno’s process now is not as planned out as it used to be. The fact that the work now goes into battle without any, or with many preliminary materials used at the same time, widens the margin for the unexpected. If the work once seemed to repeatedly erase the previous steps in its process, to deal with an apparently ever wider repertoire of choices, it now seems every time to be seeking to establish conditions to create a painting that is, above all, free and at ease, from the beginning through to the end of its production; a painting that still deals with pre-existing, borrowed materials, but through an open action, without being tied or committed to this or that author, to this or that strand, to this or that painting tradition.

On a canvas like Cabeça de ferro [Iron head] (2019), for example, there is a central element that recalls Leda Catunda’s rivers, a lower area reminiscent of Jorge Guinle’s paintings, the border with prints that perhaps refer to Jose Leonilson’s work… They are different materials that contribute to the construction of the painting, which, I repeat, seems at ease in dealing with the vocabulary of these artists, without bowing to them – on the contrary, it’s done in a manner that is free, without prior planning, without having to adapt the images, without being committed to a specific language or genre.

AW You also get yourself into trouble, in a good way, which has a lot to do with this change of procedure. You try to free yourself from many things to paint – both in the exercise of thinking about the work from a certain distance and in the moment at the studio. And I believe the position you put yourself in has a lot to do with a kind of anxiety. You are always trying to get rid of your reference points, considering that you, more than in a lot of other cases, begin a painting with many points of reference, as Zé just said. A vast collection of procedures, a vast collection of references, a vast collection of images from the world. Then comes the effort of, little by little, getting things out of the way, and we know how complicated that is. Because I know that you get to a point – which could be true or false – where you are kind of left with nothing and think, “Damn, now what, what do I do with this thing I just made?”.

That could be done in an anecdotal way, it could be an ironic, jocular comment, but I don’t think that’s what you do. When you use dripping, for example, I don’t think you’re accessing a way of painting like someone searching supermarket shelves for an available procedure. I see it as a possible reflection of a struggle born from trying to clear the field.

JAR The entire process ends in being snookered.

AW You always end up snookered. It’s a very important starting point and I think that anxiety is in the paintings, relating directly to the discomfort we are talking about, this uncomfortable thing that we’re not sure how to define, or where it is.

BD I think everything you’ve put forward exists in the works: an idea of a collection of images, a collection of the possibilities of painting, and in that sense, I’ve been interested in what painting can be since the beginning. But it’s worth pointing out that there is a reduction there, because I don’t deal with the field of painting in a broader sense. I deal with what painting can be as this traditional method, paint on cloth, what painting can be today and after all its history, of a questioning about its power to respond to a post-industrial world, mediated by photographic images, TV and the internet. What I was thinking about more were questions of a certain history of art and the development of painting as a human expression in other contexts and periods. I already mentioned the illuminated manuscripts, but I am very interested in cave painting, in Egyptian painting, basically, it’s a very diverse interest, but still within this field. It’s a passionate interest. I don’t explore it in a very studious way and I don’t write about it either. My academic life has been short. I don’t do systematic research, but I do like to look at and read about these things.

JAR Right. But you do also systemise your thinking, for example, to give classes…

BD My interest in teaching comes from the possibility of creating spaces to carry out these studies, to provide myself with another trade, a stimulus to organise ideas and look at them with other people. I feed off these meetings and try to create open approaches where everyone has a voice and can share their knowledge and research. Although these experi­ences are very varied, there is a point where everyone has an idea formed about the world and stories of art. I believe everyone has the right to knowledge, but for there to be access and construction, there have to be opportunities and interest.

There is a whole field of validation and diffusion of knowledge that goes through social structuring in order to form and circulate ideas. You need to conquer or create these physical spaces – texts, publications, universities, museums, cultural centres – to conquer people’s imagina­tions. I think this construction is stronger when the game is open, when the material possibilities of that construction are more approachable and when the spaces of access and power are shared.

I want my painting to reach some­thing of that public dimension in a way that is at ease, as Zé put it. For it to go out into the streets, you know? For it to be something common and public, not just in the sense of access to its physical presence, but in the circulation of ideas, of a sensibility, of a pulse. I think I try to do this on an intimate scale inside the studio, and I am increasingly interested in participating in this construction in the public space, in the possibility of contributing to the existence of these spaces of expansion.

JAR Bruno, let’s get back to the impact the coup against President Dilma Rousseff had on your production. Firstly, I admire the fact that there is no discursive reaction in the work to the episode that mobilized it – the fact that your production doesn’t confuse non-conformism with a propagandist expression, of slogans or emblems. On the contrary, the work seems to internalize this non-conformism in the forms of the painting. In any case, what really caught my attention in what you said was this association between the breakdown of a social and political pact and the freedom you said took you away from the “questions about painting” you had been struggling with before. My question is: what thoughts, what parts, what principles in the work were tied to the Brazilian social and political order before? And how do you see art and the possibilities of its inclusion in Brazilian society today? How do you perceive art’s place in today’s society? Would you say that there is a specificity to the language of painting in this context?

BD I agree with what you said about the work not having gained a discursive dimension because of a political episode that affected the lives of the entire Brazilian society. But, for me, it was disturbing to realise that this breakdown of the social pact also caused tensions in structures of legitimation, in terms of how art is perceived, of its place in society, its circulation and of a politicization of taste in the visual arts. This has intensified since 2016, and I think this path led towards a deeper awareness of what it is to be a citizen, which led me to another awareness of what it is to be an artist. I don’t disassociate these two states and I came to an understanding that didn’t exclude the autonomy of each of them. The questions of the language of painting, of the image and its stories, remain fundamental in the work, but today they exist alongside questions about social and cultural structures, which were always precarious, insufficient and exclusionary. It seems contradictory, because it’s as though, out of a socially traumatic experience, my experience as an artist individual accelerated, and something in that reflection on questions spe­cific to pictorial language lost its importance, at the same time that it started to act more powerfully within the works. This, which was already in conflict, dissipates and what is left is this layer of thinking about how art or painting is put to work in society, how it is stratified in the mechanics of a constrained cultural apparatus that encompasses its production, circulation and the way it is appreciated.

JAR One of the motivations, then, was to extrapolate or break down the limits of this stratification?

BD I don’t know if it was to extrapolate those limits, because that’s a very big thing and goes beyond my individual experience. It needs to be a collective and public effort. What I want to say is that I found myself as an artist who has had the opportunity to be trained in art at universities, institutions, artist studios, who spends time with other artists of various ages, who has seen many exhibitions, who has had the privilege to travel to see art… My training, despite being very centred on a portion of Brazilian modern and contemporary art, has a European and North American bias. A part of Brazilian art has this bias, and has been struggling with that for at least a century. I had to look at the space I occupy in society, at the cultural structure that formed my visual thinking, and understand that I play a part in a collective historic process. How does visual arts organise itself materially within our society? How is the diffusion of that imaginary organize? I would say that art’s place in society is in construction, in collaborating in the construction of the imaginary of an individual, of a group, of a country, or the world. The field of visual arts is still very separate from Brazilian society. We have a market that is structurally very strong, but with low numbers of representation in relation to the number of artists today, and which largely does not mirror the diversity of Brazilian culture. The institutions are highly dependent on public-private partnerships to keep going and this is a reflection of an absence of public policies for the sector. The outcome of this is a kind of hijacking of the possibility of a broad and democratic construction of this imaginary through the visual arts. There have been periods where this was thought about with more public intentions, but that were no less class-based in their structures. The whole of Brazilian modernism from the 1920s to 1950s, neo-concretism, tropicalism, the magazines Malasartes and A parte do fogo, the participation of Paulo Sérgio Duarte, Ferreira Gullar and Iole de Freitas in FUNARTE, and INAP (Instituto Nacional de Artes Plasticas) at the end of the 1970s and start of the 1980s, were initiatives that opened up spaces for modern and contemporary art to circulate and be debated.

I don’t think painting having some commitment to the specificity of its language is so relevant today. Modernity has already achieved that. We already understand painting not only as representation, but also as a manifestation of ways of making, of temperaments that emerge through the way you manipulate the materials, the tools, the matter…For me, the commitment to these specificities should be worked on more in the area of education, in ways of spreading culture and knowledge. The autonomy of art was one of the most important achievements of modernity, but it needs to be spread without seeming alienated from the processes of being a citizen, separated from the social and cultural realities of the people.

JAR Was that what drove an understanding of artistic practice guided by a “Western”, European, North American tradition?

BD Not exactly. What drove that understanding was an idea of violence, which is still very diffuse for me, and I don’t identify this presence as a characteristic of Brazilian painting. Violence is an important element of Cinema Novo, for example. The language and presence of Glauber Rocha, who also addresses this in the text “Eztetyka da fome [Aesthetics of hunger]”, is violent. I think what drove it was a stronger feeling of something I had already seen in the sociality and in history of Brazil:a society that believes in punishment and violence to resolve the most diverse social conflicts and which has never managed to reflect broadly on historical phenomena like slavery, oligarchic rule, the military dictatorship, etc. The product of this is a societal culture that is enslaved, racist, authoritarian, chauvinistic, built on a logic that is punitive, inquisi­tive, colonialist and genocidal in relation to Amerindian peoples and the black population. The understanding came from discomfort with reality itself and from the need to respond to this with the language of my work, in a way that is non-conformist, but also non-propagandist. So, it’s kind of this place that made me uncomfortable. We need to change further to get out of it. It’s our condition that needs to be mixed up.

AW When you talk about your desire to be a metaphysical artist, working with intimate colour, with the expan­sion of time, and about it being uncomfortable to discover that you were maybe a little stranger than the set model at that time, or that the paintings gained strength in that they moved in a more conflicting, less peaceful place, I still don’t know if discomfort is the exact word for what we’re talking about. I actually think that the difficulty in finding this refers to the place that a very interesting part of your work comes from. You were becoming more at ease with existing with this strangeness and with these differences, right?

BD That’s right! I think I was becoming more at ease in creating my work, at being open to what was happening inside the studio. I’m not an artist with a very defined plan or idea about what to do, but I’m also not an artist of chance. So the work has that element of the day to day, of pauses, of reflection and adjustments that form the paintings. It’s from what I do, reflect on, accumulate and discard that things happen. I’ve been producing work for almost fifteen years, and it feels like I’m starting now.

JAR Around 2010, one of the qualities of the work, in my opinion, was the anguish that the paintings allowed us to glimpse, something of “I can’t go forward, I must go forward”. Beyond that, the work carried a great deal of historical weight in each canvas that was shown. It wasn’t suffering, but it was evident that the painting went through impasses. And what I see today looks like an “anxious object”, to borrow Harold Rosenberg’s term. Anxiety of the kind that doesn’t allow itself to be satisfied, while risking different directions to construct just one image.

It’s also this anxiety that turns the process of making them visible. The accumulation of diverse solutions is grouped together in different parts of the canvas, with a result that is somewhat open-ended. There are many markings that look like the start of a filling in of space, something that wasn’t finished, there are many open forms without contours. All this suggests anxiety, as if the work was interrupted, rushed, in the middle of its processes, still in the fervour of labour. And this open, ignited, switched on aspect gives the work vivacity. Nothing arrives ready, complete, finished, it arrives with points still to be joined together. This might be one of the principal qualities of the work today.  Without trying to create a hierarchy, “yesterday was better”, “today is better”, I think these differences are well marked out, at least for me.

AW I also think there was a change in the construction of the works that favoured this type of making. In earlier paintings (2015/16/17) you can see that Bruno used bigger brushes, broader strokes, sometimes resolving a large area of the canvas in just one action. I think the final layer of paint seemed faster. Some works were even made in a single session. In some of these new paintings (like Fuzileiro [Marine], 2019) you seem to make the opposite movement. You increased the scale many times, working with more diluted paint, smaller strokes, with more layers, in more sessions. It seems like you’re not even expecting there to be one movement that will resolve the whole painting at once. Some were even left in the studio for a while, waiting to be resolved. That changes the game a bit, living with a painting for two or three years... That change also seems to go in the direction of various points that Zé mentioned, as though they fostered contradictory questions and procedures existing in the same work simultaneously.

In the paintings there seems to be an accumulation of “things to be resolved”. They’re not a calculated project: it’s as though a transmutation happened in the individual’s relation­ship with the painting, a chemistry took place, and inadequacy became the method. It’s neither an existential issue, nor an affective issue, but an originally formal issue. If the paintings are a grouping of conflicts that coexist with no intention of pacification, I think they support themselves by this mismatch, that’s where they draw their strength. The idea of the work forgetting a little about the conclusions of the earlier paintings can be really powerful, despite the difficulty that this movement brings with it. There is something in the paintings that gives the impression that you had to forget what you got right in the earlier work in order to start the next. We could relate this to a feeling of constriction, as though you were gradually trying to invent a place with no exit, to find a new path from that. The paintings seem to deal with an idea of exhaustion. As though the gesture of making something consumed that thing the moment it was finished, with no sense in repeating that process, or repeating that painting. You always have to move on to another.

BD I think this has to do with the idea of keeping something alive, something that I’m still trying to elaborate. Maybe this idea of exhaustion and of inadequacy as a method is already in the language of the work.

JAR I want to go back to a few points to distinguish what I called erudition and which you, Bruno, understood as a technical skill. When I say the work is cultured, erudite, I’m thinking about the information of the repertoire, about conceptual knowledge, beyond the technical part of making, that inform the production – and none of these traits exclude your desires to be commonplace, for the paintings to have a presence on the street, too, as you said. But as far as making the paintings goes, I think an important characteristic of the work, is letting the limitations of your dexterity, of your technical skill, remain evident, on show, exposing them openly, in processes that are also ingenious and unexpected. It’s more or less when the imperfect, the inconclusive, or the dissonant, when the accidents, the crudities coincide with the idea of vivacity, above all because they result in sudden decisions, which in turn invigorate the results. Anyway, as Ale said: the work is more open to the unplanned, and the technical limitations appear in a frank way, they constitute the work – the accidents, the smears, the smudges, the discon­tinuities, the leftovers on view.

BD The valorisation of technical skill is related to the sense of constructing something difficult, a valorisation of  difficulty as a value to be admired, a very clear distinction between managing to make something special, or not. The same reasoning would serve to talk about erudition. I prefer the idea of vivacity, because it relates to the idea of open processes, of having a freshness which I identify as an ethic of making, almost an ethic against skill, against hiding how the thing in front of you was made. This also comes from my training, from my understanding of the concretists and neo-concretists, of the Russian vanguard, of the North American minimalists, of artists like Amilcar de Castro, Vladimir Tátlin and Donald Judd. I think I have inherited something of that thinking, which appears in an aesthetically opposite way in my work, because it appears through accumulation and not from a synthetic procedure with an industrial clarity. It appears in a chaotic way that is difficult to apprehend immediately, and perhaps the movement it demands from perception is what relates to vivacity.

AW About this possible lack of technical skill, I think that also plays a part in the type of variations that the paintings carry, in the differences between them. There is something a little “awkward” in each of them which means they’re not obedient to a highly planned strangeness. The works generally exist in two places at the same time: the strangest ones store a little of the most tranquil ones, and vice-versa.

BD I wouldn’t say they’re strange and tranquil, but strange and beautiful. I can’t separate the two things. But this keeps moving, and goes back to the question of apprehension and vivacity. I’m searching for a terrain that is not so stratified, and there is an element of risk there. I find it interesting for it not to be given to such pre-established conceptions, because the perception of the paintings changes. I try to put them in a place that is open, where everything that could be definable coexists with things that I still don’t know.

JAR The title of the exhibition, Virá [It will come], also suggests some­thing transitive, looking forward.

BD I think all the exhibitions I did from 2014 to 2020 were attempts to move myself away from the perception I had about my work that was shown in the exhibition e [and], 2013. That produced something for me that was dehydrated, sterile, mute. I think I’ve only just come out of that perception. These are paintings that emerge from that journey, and I think the title, Virá, declared at such a horrible time – the pandemic, the advance of the extreme right, disastrous political processes in Brazil and in the world, withdrawals of rights and social achievements – shows that my position is of fighting, of transformation and possibility. I live this position, and not only within my studio. I live this in my actions, in the way I move within society, in the things I do beyond painting, with the people with whom I construct another place in micro-political dimensions, but that is growing. What we are living through today is pendular, it will pass and I think civil society has an important role in this historic process. It’s our responsibility to formulate a new social pact. So, I see it from a perspective of construction and work. There is a lot to do, in my painting, between people, in the relationships in the art world – that excites me.

This text was developed from two conversations held on September 2020 at Bruno Dunley’s studio and the exhibition Virá, at Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo.