Untitled #241

X MARKS THE SPOT, 2
THE MAP OF THE NIGHT
From 1998 onwards Fernando Calhau started to paint canvases that had modulations of black, at first painted by brush and then going back to using the compressor, as he had done in the early seventies.
Now, however, what appeared in his canvases were nocturnal skies, inevitably seen as romantic. He used to say that he enjoyed painting as if a dome of night surrounded the spectator. These are very demanding paintings, both for the painter and the spectator. For the painter because they are the result of the development of a somewhat patient technique using very narrow and well-defined presuppositions: the square format, the subtlety of tones of black and grey, the marking of the creases in a trompe-l’oeil; for the spectator because they are paintings in which one sees very little, which makes one force one’s gaze and sharpen one’s sight. They do not give themselves; they have to be conquered.
For that reason they are seductive.
But also because they call up an imaginary about night, orientation; there is a chamber epic in them, to use an obvious paradox. This is what happened in 1976 with his works about the sea. In these last years of his life Calhau’s choice fell upon that deep field which is seen by us as a surface, and which is the night sky.
Calhau set out creases in those skies, divisions of the canvas, superimposings of planes that marked out his own particular view of that depth as a Nietzschean wrinkle of surface. He pointed out places in that pitch darkness into which his monochrome, tragic and intimate paintings were turned.
They are paintings to be seen alone.

Delfim Sardo