Jaime Prades

Text from exhibition "Peacemakers"

RESPONSE TO ESCORIAL
THE PEACEMAKERS BY JAIME PRADES

"To men who live the tríade between the Old and the New World and traditional societies, the one thing which is left is to peacefy , due to the conflicts of the coexistence between cultures in this level, are already at war".
from the Author

"Everything created in deficient (diminutum) and everything deficient moves in a direction towards one beginning, which has a complement and an end".
Avveróis

In 1656, D. Diego Rodrigues da Silva e Velásquez cleared the court of Felipe IV, after a large learning tragectory and an intense political action of the official master, Francisco Pacheco to introduce him to the Spanish nobels, no one would have imagined, besides the painter, that and the current inherited majesty of Felipe II, would be the first inventors of an art collection intentionally considered a percursor invention of the modern museum from the Monestario de San Lorenzo El Escorial. And this collection is tremedously magic, which for centuries, the search for the missing pieces during the El Escorial invasion prevails.
From a king and an artist, incredibly clever, modus operandi was founded in the collectionist and curatorial method which defends the science of painting, still used today including all the cortesans implications since the contemporary plot, involving the creative experiences from the artists in various instances of the power game which is imutable in all times and all places where in the past and today the collectionism and art market function.
Evidently without kings or queens, filled with sponsorship and market capitals questions, besides the global rules of the productive chain which impose the curator figure, no longer the artist gave representation as a guide and maker of the art collections.
The tiring ways of institutionalizing art is visible, for example, the museumgraphy of the Prado Museum, in Spain, or in big international showings, which miraculosly survive inside the halls of art fairs, changing with vigor towards the origin of nationality and heritage of each country. In the world of today, the flux exists between the contraband and the legalized artifacts which are both deliberate and different from the precepts of construction of El Escorial when the intuitive was to read the painting as science and a testament to the cultural capacity, not to request fortunes throught the growing regulated art market in order to operate the economy of the culture capital, which is visible.
Jaime Prades, born in Madrid in 1958 atests the inverse situation like this and other countries acts, in terms of the market, not only in art, but in a logic which functions in a culture towards men and at the same time privatizes the rights to autheticize the body.
Squeeze well whats behind the behaviours of an artist like Jaime Prades, which says in respect to the primarial disagragation, that functions as a permanent migration of one which doesn´t stop migrating, turning the migration as a form of existence since birth, and not only when arriving in the country, but leaving the "country of origin".
Which means, this migrant, that no longer belongs to his place of origin, will carry with him, the first images of the world in which he was born, like the caresses, the learnings of the Spanish atmosphere, specially the Arabic-Spanish culture situated around Alhambra.
For the Titãs generation, being from nowhere is a conscious merit, to Jaime, its at least a corporal experience that would never fit in a simple classic enclosure, in a white cube, or like the preaching in the lyrics found in a Rock song.
In the works of Jaime Prades, drawing, was always present, like a perception of an artistic ambience not holding itself to one language. In this sense it seems the influence of Antonio Mingote, a famous Spanish graphic humorist, since Jaime´s childhood, takes him to an universe connecting him to a symbolic character connected to living in the trace in space and not found in traditional supports. Also, in his father´s work, found in the film industry as well as in the circulated works in newspapers of humorist Mingote, expanded Jaime Prades perspectives of possibilities presented in a non conventional universe of learning where it separates traditional languages. This means, language and communication, already makes up his formation in an one way perception.
Later on, living with the production and the living, mainstream perception of the works of Pablo Picasso, already in Brazil, leaving his first home in Vale do Paraíba going towards São Paulo, Jaime experiences a "feverish state", where hallucinations decomposes Guernica in his imagination, taking not the potential of Guernica, but Africa, as a result of the amplified perception, causing an emotional incident due to his second migration, once again targeted during his migration situtation. Synergy and disaggregation take him in his perception as a consequence of effects over a person which is segregated from a social group leaving behing a counterpoint established between Spain and Brazil in the arrival, entering São Paulo, passing through the Escola Contemporânia de Arte, taking courses with live models, under the teachings of Gregório Gruber of the Pinacoteca do Estado, establishing a definite line as a forerunner as an artist. In touch with Álvaro Apocalypse at the Festival de Inverno in Ouro Preto in 1973 something else seems to have stayed in the works of Jaime Prades, like a human transfiguration and a fantastic universe of images and dolls which once again escalate what Mingote already had opened, like a field of expression which spreads what later he transcribes to his following. Beyong the woodcut, the ethic legacy of engraving learned from José Guyer Salles in 1975 at the Oficina de Gravuras 76 in São Paulo, is also an example of his learnings in art with his own production.
After a period of learning and negating what he has learnt, Jaime emerges in the paulistano scene through the group TUPINÃODÁ. Initially formed by Milton Sogabe, Zé Carratu, Eduardo Duar e Cézar Teixeira, it expands Jaime´s individual urban occupation, and here is the place for reflection from which art that goes to the street, which needs to go to the street, once again, without the stigma of graffiti, nevertheless considered one of the pioneers of graffiti in São Paulo.
Since then, Jaime Prades machines, are an example of inabitability of expression from the clusters of institutions. A street expression and a meticulous analysis of his panels less binary more towards humor, reveal a painting joining the aesthetic density and the architectural residual found in the walls throughout the city.
Curiously the lines found on the concrete migrate to his paintings of traditional artisanship. The difference nevertheless is , in this work, the statement isn´t about observation, but an urban contemplation, like it is seen in the urban landscapes of Gregorio Gruber, a precursor of this genre. On the contrary, there is an expression which reflects the direct interaction with a space in the city and the variations of the architectural body expanding the intermediation of senses between reason and expression towards the direct body contact and the urban scale which receive the new painting and joins the architectural cover with the new support. Having important architectural projects or not being responsible for the generation of the surfaces created, Jaime has encountered situations since the decade of the 80´s up to the most recent when revealing his peacemaker allegories on the surface of a dumpster, for example.
But it couldn´t have missed him, other than, the understanding of fragmentation and reorganization of the urban pieces, assuming in all faces of his work what´s known today as resilience. Jaime paints on scraps and it seems he is reconstituting the body of cities which he left behind, in each one of the situations where he signlizes since the machine paintings until the volume of the trees, present in the "Human Nature" series completed in 2008.
It seems Jaime Prades is a premanent migrant of cities and of visual languages, someone who dances between the visual fenomenons, building works which at the same time fit the traditional collection of art works and sometimes objects, with the most pure neutralized interactions, completely without the gestural marks, making him create voracious machines on the streets, making steel figures, limiting the absolute abnegation in the state of the art.
In this aspect, it is certainly the most difficult assimulation, which we identify in the metamorphisis from Jaime Prades production, taking him, through an orbit of aesthetic fragility, when comparing the present materiality in each one of his series. Nevertheless, if we observe better, it is this specific courage of multiplying his figures, metamorphosizing the supports, like a designer of its own art, inserting in a reflection which is very significant about the way of making, taking his art to the boarders of the non-art, in terms of intention. This action of weakening the art, in the means of aesthetics, is really primordial, in the sense that it exposes the art, to its material limit, like the great conceptual artists do.
His art, sometimes light, watered down, brutal and insinuating, doesn´t go through the type of banalization from its own jokes, like the subversion of a "Monalisa" painting, for an example, with vanguard alterated clichés, practiced by many Latin-American artists.
Different from which his action squeezes the "permanent crisis" between the machine and the humanoid situation, profoundly wasting the conservation totem from the art inside the institutions, expliciting how art museum versions are inadequate, where we import from the world to the Iberic world. Migrants like Jaime Prades, coming to Brazil in the time of discovery, are socially alike with this action of impermanence that guides the imaginary Brazilian, making Brazilians like him, unafraid of liberty, of having the necessity of being apart of a socially predictable path , committed to a past tradition of a modeled civilization.
Another key point on understanding Jaime Prades current series is, despite our violent society, we build a peaceful discurse that even demagogic, it is infused in the Brazilian social roots. Always expelled from its place, it is natural for the immigrants to look for peace where they arrive after being expelled with an intent to stay, like it´s the case of sephardics whom were the first Brazilian habitants for taking on a diaspora post discovery. The "Peacemakers" are built on this logic as well. Afterall, we are expelled from our Old World and reproduce a metonymy of being expelled with a migration synonym that strangely constitutes, in one way, a primordiality in our incertain and renegated origins.
At the same time, no longer needing to migrate, we carry a sense of migration and the desire to pacify the place from our ascending origin. Prades painting migrates to the street and the "peacemaker" migrates to the walls. There is a permanence impermanent in the language and in the posture of Jaime Prades which only he, endures on the way of this binomial since the experience from the TUPINÃODÁ group.
Since 1984, he goes on to paint the streets, effectively, the atavistic sense and static from his painting completely inverts to a logic in space paralysing his painting: instead of observing it still, the painting freezes in its metaphysics, we take on looking the movement and of the passage from where the painting expresses movement from the definition of the machines, like we see in the expression of the graphics starting to stay flatter little by little, revealing a space between what runs through the line with an ending and revealing a tension between the empty spaces from the busy surface.
The art of Jaime Prades isn´t street art neither traditional painting. It is an art which thresholds edging towards a fragil aesthetic, justifying towards not composing more of a classical modern scope or an informality from conceptual options from artists of his generations, like the great and gregorian history from which was built in our past.
Like the street art is an insuficient terminology used to qualify his work, he can be considered a pioneer from diverse manifestations linked to this term, it starts from a toy art up to a graffiti that can be seen in the expression from the young Ciro Schunemann and his modeled universe in biomechanoids, for an example. If Ciro goes by Giger, Jaime goes directly by a notation, almost classic, from painting to the streets. And in hours, in the convention of the work at the workshop, possibly in parallels from the works of Torres-Garcia. The distinctive aesthetic Uruguayan painter and thinker which we discord in the totality of what he has written and what he has drawn in his masterly idea drawn in "La Ciudad sin Nombre".
It is in the city with out a name, in my ways of seeing, the works of Jaime Prades and his contemporaries whom looked for streets, situate with one another. It wouldn´t be too much to access what a noisy complementary work "floresta urbana" from 1988 and the trees from the series "Natureza Humana", could extinguish the prejudices against the aparent fragil aesthetic in many of the works in the series "Dos absurdos/The absurds, "Tipos/Types", "Os Bartardos/The Bastards", even in the "Pacificadores/Peacemakers", like we are going to see in the newer works.
The work of Jaime gains a questioning of action and attitute that seems to purposely annulates the studio and accentuates the visuals in the streets, taking the art from the inside to the outside in an extremely punctual and radical way. His multiples of steel are multiples. The "peacemakers" when hung on oxidized steel and marble gain another connotation. There is another subliminal turn in the modern painting which can be felt in his sculpture from where, sometimes resembles Miró. And it would naturally be absurd to insert Jaime Prades in this context of traditional art, but in spite of it, it isn´t absurd to say he has migrated the symbology of the symbology of modern art in his production.
His columns possess a parallel with a colorful and geometric purety from the works of Rubem Valentim. Other two readings could be revealed here: a spiritual and a genetic. Returning to the visions of Jaime Prades from deconstructing Guernica, like him, himself mentions: "in a specific moment I noticed that, what I was saying in my unconscious, wasn´t Guernica, it was Africa!". So Jaime Prades, in the "Peacemakers" accentuates not only what the "imaginary Africa", but also, his graphics, from which run with the same clarity of option in the direct matrix and in his symbology, not what would continue the cubist scientific spirit.
Another interesting question about his work is not on the threshold between the painting and on the graffiti. There is also, no diference between his sculpture with a more artistic significance and its appropriations in volume, the concrete fragments that he makes demolicions to overlay his graphics.
Another question about his work and not his proposition about his work is: "Why is Jamie Prades not opting for a visual resolution about his work from where it would take him to a conventional universe of historical maturity and marketable place in art"?
Particularly, I do not risk on finding out an answer. But let´s imagine, his works, "Torre Branca", "Paisagem Branca" (both in 1997) and his sculptures in bronze "Torre" and "Organic" made in 1996, would have been placed next to the "Metamorfoses" of Maria Martins. Nothing would have lost its worth, having dialogued about the abstract sculpture worthiness from what breaks the usage of conventional materials, like bronze.
Now, let´s go back to the condition of men in the urban world and the extreme violent condition where we live, located in Brazilian cities. It is a violence which starts with breathing, with the intake of nurturing even the literal criminal act of exterminating. It is not only a physical extemination we live in, it is an extermination of senses. It isn´t the city the one responsible for this, it is the lack of provision of humanizing whom live in the city. In this sense, the "Peacemakers" are a meditive question, flat, in the potential symbolic force and rapid comprehension through out the part of who goes off with them. Peace to Tolstós is in the density of "Peace and War", when to Jaime, it is in the cognitive sense, sculptural, flat and direct. Therefore, there is nothing to hide, collect, or preserve other than the senses of a concience from which results the symbolic action of the peacemaker producing the immediate perception to the subject matter.
In "Brutos/Bruts" we notice well a negation in the residual of the material and the care for the fragment in the subjective history from which was demolished with a destruction of a wall.
Jaime Prades is primitive. Is popular without being popular. His work reflects archaic structures, representative of an era where in the city it has already occurred and no longer is the newer happening like it was for the modernists.
We follow observing a micro world of texture of the machines to understand the subliminal microstructure of the "Peacemakers". The "Peacemakers" arrive on a level of not so much formal importance, at the same time where its symbology wins importance. They are flat volumes. They are flat sculptures, drawings where latently its own tridimensionality, expanding the trace and supporting the culture of the symbol. Not noise like the machines, but the silence of the metal planiflying and the electrostatic painting. Let´s see what is the creative junction of Jaime´s work, where it says in respect of the body of the city and what signifies theses projects that also exist in his work "Planeta no túnel/Planet in the tunnel". Let´s desmount, the peacemakers, mentioning them, piece by piece, as flat forms almost canceling the sculptural body, from the point of view of the sculptural language. And let´s also be delirious standing off from reason, from the critics, from philosophy, from the faculties which compose the critic text about the work of a conventional artist. This discouragement of the sculptural body is almost significant as the discouragement of the trace which Leonilson pushed in his work.
It´s enough to reflect freely to see the work of Prades isn´t only speaking of the city, like the graffiti transmits. They are very different origins, the question of protest and of expansion of form, from the outside of the universe of institutions of art. The protest is more connected to the discussion of the support if the limit, in this case, of what is necessity in the social occupation, like it is a major part of the artists in the grand wave of graffiti, seen recently. It was a conscient movement which took Jaime towards the expression of liberation in the art that is today composed of the primordial street art in Brazil.
His work, in truth, is part of the group of works of visual artists that have opened the streets for public art, provoking an existence of a scene happening outside of the control of the establishment. One of the strongest brands of this action is in fact, of one of these artists effectively coming from the engravings and the print shop, where they went to the walls, an example of Alex Vallauri, that in 1978 in São Paulo, took a decisive step tattooing the skin and the walls, according to Prades readings, his contemporary, takes an element of the impressionists and transforms it in a stencil, as a speciment of the "poor cousin of silkscreen", multiplying through the spray, producing a true explosion of stamps on the wall, at the same time applied by Carlos Matuck and Waldemar Zaidler. On an attentive perspective, we notice this transmutation of the engraving as well as in the work of the newest in the tradition, like the paulista Daniel Melim (stencil), the woodcut, in the case of, also paulista Speto, and woodcut and the chisel, in the case of Francisco Rodrigues, o Nunca, one more paulista which is an example of an artist who transcribes his engravings to an universe of the spray. It´s been almost 40 years of Brazilian art in the discovery of the distancing between the art of the inside and outside. Jaime Prades is also apart of this group of artists.
The works of Jaime, still, in the context of his generation, are works, who speak of the post-city as modern and not as a city post-modern. Like Keith Haring and Basquiat. But in the case of Prades and his production, it reflects on one more component from one of the aesthetic liberation from theses artists whom produce ancestral perceptions, of the pre-city, like the cities of India which raise peaceful temples, who foist an ancient life of a pre-urban culture also townish, escaping from this graphic component and the africanization of the trace from the bigger part of the production seen in street art.
The junctions from his "Peacemakers" in his amourphous progression, when we observe the spaces between one figure and the other, are real cobogós* (Cobogós or Muxarabis: dripping bricks, normally made out of concrete, creating strong graphic patterns and are used to construct walls facilitating for bigger ventilation and luminosity) of formal and subjective coexistence. It can be said, the form for Jaime is secondary towards the questioning of internal and external movements, that a form is capable to activate the human conscience and registrate it not only in conceptual and formal aspects, but also expose the measurement sof the generic critic through the components of ancestral cities from modern cities, in sculpture and in lifestyles.
The real is unreal, the machine is the body. The peace is an flat organism in this profusion which inspite of so much multidirectionality of intentions and actions of distinctive subjects, it procurs to leave a breath between the being and of the other, whatever it may be the state of the internal monsters. The same one whom surround the "Peacemakers" giving a solution of humor for pain. This dimension towards the breath between the monsters of our own creation, is, nevertheless, the secret to peace of the series "Pacificadores/Peacemakers". Like the Indian temples, bequeath the spiritual culture to the desire.
The city of Jaime Prades can be compreehened like a profuse form of pre-cities that founded a culture of the Orient and the West. Conceptually, it resembles procities.
It is inside the symbolic valleys and between the art limits and of the non-art which Jaime Prades (or Sr. Pradesh) created, what is one of the great values of his work and maybe the most important sense of the series "Pacificadores/Peacemakers".
The density of the emptiness and of the vast field of the empty-abstract that is one solemnly vector of an integration with a empty urban mass, a space where the air is easying the great coexistence between the multiplicity of senses of peace which each individual experiements on being in the world. Peace reveals fully the cobogó of "Peacemakers", seen in this sample.
The "Peacemakers" are one more element of the formula between the Old World and the New World and Africa, which screamed unconsciously of Jaime Prades, emerging like a complex graphic-pictoric-sculptural narrative, in a work who dances in front of our eyes, responding to the origin of El Escorial with the name oposition of being unable to collect, emerged from a stateless maker , whom invented these forms and united the fragments like the magic profusion of the Indian temples , it isn´t art to be seen from the outside to the inside, but from the inside to the outside, guarding a meditation and an internal silence, a voice whom is more qualified and epicentral of all the cosmic dance implicating the conscience of existing to fit the being in the existencial balance, motivating an atual society, instead of guarding your own creators only in museums, know how to place it on the streets for a cyclic immediate interaction inside an order and a disorder of the world and of the type of peace contradictory in which we are submitted.