Between yellow and brown I see gray 

Pedro Ivo Verçosa revealed, on one occasion, that he was very interested in <the condensation of  time>. In saying this, he was referring to a modus operandi in which he overlaps various portraits of  the same person. The human figure was chosen as his most frequent object of study, but this does  not mean that painting it, with all the indescribable, the unstable, and uncertain qualities that the  human being carries, is a simple task. Pedro Ivo confronts faces, hands, necks, gestures, and gazes,  making no secret that it is the complexity of the subjective that delights him [1]. Even objects, when  they were the focus of his work, allowed themselves to emerge in their singularities, even coming to  take on a life of their own. This is evident in the collection of small watercolor drawings from 2013,  in the form of a filmic narrative, cuts of fleeting moments in white and gray, like frames from a film  left in the past, which he named Memória. 

In Pedro Ivo's body of work, there is a curious movement of image concealment, and this is an  interesting situation to analyze because it is something that persists, taking on different forms,  permeating his entire journey and giving each series its differences in what has become image. One  sees not only another, but others, or even, as the artist himself noted, a return of the image of the  other to oneself, as part of the process of redoing the portrait through painting, transforming the  other's image into a self-portrait: “[...] would these images not simply be masks covering my  understanding and interpretation of this image, giving that portrait the status of a self-portrait?” [2] 

Concealing the image, however, does not mean erasing it but transforming it, resignifying it, cutting  it, modifying it, as part of what becomes the exercise of subjectivization that grants each painting its  singularity. The figures become stains. Cézanne comes to mind: Gilles Deleuze wrote that the  painter, unable to bear the good drawing, < [...] would throw himself on it, extracting its form and  content.> [3] In the process of constituting images over time, Pedro Ivo untangles the subjects of his  paintings as he detaches himself from the pictorial mass and gets closer to his themes of interest,  making the contours of what he sees increasingly clearer; in a way, acting on the canvas as if to  clear it. To clear it not as an action of cleaning to the point of there being nothing, but it can mean –  although it may seem paradoxical – to condense it to the point of forcing one to see, and this can be  done by extracting objects from the surrounding environment as highlights for the painting (where  the painter himself intervenes, objectifying himself in a faceless self-portrait), such as in the 2015  series called Incômodo de um cômodo vazio, or in the hand paintings from 2020, which highlight a 

part of the body that becomes as worthy of notice as a face for a portrait. It is likely that this  approach had to do with beginning to value less the material power of paint, contrasting with what,  in 2005/2006, Pedro Ivo stated when he was just starting to paint: <[...] above all, painting should  highlight characteristics of the material used; I was fascinated by how oil paint could retain the  brushstroke's mark and suggest the gesture made with the brush to create a stain.> [4] 

We know that in art, norms hold no absolute value. Everything is relative. As Gilles Deleuze said,  referring to paintings before they are painted: <[...] the painter does not paint to reproduce on the  canvas an object that functions as a model, he paints over images that are already there, to produce a  canvas whose functioning subverts the relationship between the model and the copy.> [5] Pedro Ivo  moves in the opposite direction from what one might expect in the trajectory of figuration, starting  with abstraction. In his first series from 2006, which, according to him, was his longest series, the  depicted figure is eclipsed by the mass of paint, by the excess of brushstrokes. A Avó, from 2007,  one of the paintings in this series, is pure sensation; almost tactile. While the figure seems to  dissipate, it occupies with presence the corner of the canvas in which it is placed: we are not sure if  it is dissolving or is about to reconstitute itself as an image. 

Nuno Ramos wrote: <It was no longer a skin, nor a surface: it had transformed into some kind of  sandy material. [...] Behind each skin, therefore, I found only degraded forms of the superficial  skin.> [6] For a few more years, Pedro Ivo's paintings remain nebulous, restless, dark, and covered  by brushstrokes that confuse background and figure. The artist described the figures as <shadows>,  which could refer to a face, a somewhat unclear figure, or some volumetric appearance. The series  Gestos do Cotidiano, from 2006/2009, and the series Intervalos, from 2010/2011, are part of the  enigma of figures that reveal little, occupying nearly the entire surface, while being dense, blocking  our view of what would be the mundane or the spaced-out, as the titles suggest, frustrating those  who look for these signs. 

In Merleau-Ponty's perception, there is a recursive impasse, which he calls an enigma, that lies  between the seen and the visible: <[...] it is what is between things and, even though each one  remains in its place, they also < [...] eclipse each other> [7]. He says: <The visible world and my  motor projects are total parts of the same being>. [8] In other words, the body is indivisible,  indistinguishable from the world, while at the same time occupying its own space, which is  identified through the envisioning of itself and the other, a paradox that Ponty points to as eternally  recurring.

Clearly, the challenges of proposing to see and present (more than just represent) are not small.  Pedro Ivo uses the photographic camera, the cellphone camera, and the webcam as filters to get  closer to the people he wants to paint, and this modus operandi points to the antinomy of distance/ approach, a maxim when it comes to addressing the relationship of the artist who uses the camera to  capture his object of desire, capturing that fleeting moment, even when posed, because there is  always something that is not known, something that hides from the lens, no matter how focused it  is. 

Between the radical gesture implicit in the photographic act, according to Dubois [9], and painting,  there is a gap created by the difference between the two instances of seeing, elaborating, and  making. This relationship between the two mechanisms of image capture and treatment (the use of  the technical device and the act of painting) provokes a certain tangle, caused by the transit that the  figure undergoes, from the first moment when the artist places his eyes on it to the moment when  the painting transforms it into an image, like a game of "telephone," a game that circulates a secret,  and loses its original meaning as the listening fails and interprets what is heard, passing forward  what it imagines to have heard. 

In these revolutions that the figure undergoes until it becomes an image through devices, there is a  desire for closeness, but an impossibility of complete appropriation, because something is lost in  translation, turning into something else, another situation, another story. It is no coincidence that  Pedro Ivo chose the phrase from poet Joseph Brodsky as an epigraph to present his artistic  trajectory in his dissertation: <What can one do, if our vision lacks the power to devour objects in  ecstasy, in an instant, leaving nothing but the emptiness of an ideal form, a sign [...]>.[10] 

What remains from the ecstasy, produced by what one focuses on with the intention of turning it  into an image, undergoes what Didi-Huberman names as <cracking>, a moment when the image is  called into question, positioning it prior to its status as a represented figure, to see it as an open  figure, in process. The image needs to form itself, in waves of meaning, from the learnings, from the  contexts that time and space provide, which the artist cannot escape, because the world, as Merleau Ponty said, <[...] has engraved within it (the painter) the numbers of the visible.> [11] 

If there are cracks in the status of the figure and strategies of concealment in Pedro Ivo's paintings,  there are also reflections on the limits and powers of visibility. The numbers of the visible in  painting, for Merleau-Ponty, are secret since, for him, painting would not seek the exterior of  movement. Moreover, the philosopher says, the extreme visibility in which the painter lives  transforms the world into a < [...] almost mad world, for it is complete, yet it is only partial>, since 

[...] to see is to have at a distance [12]. To the idea of partiality, we can add the notion of interval,  which Pedro Ivo brought as the title for his 2011 series and which served as a turning point for his  working process at the time, when he was studying the phases that make up an interval of time as  discernible parts of image states, an issue he attributed as part of his future process. 

Thus, the idea of thinking about the interval (as condensation or expansion, according to the  painter) also appears in his latest and most recent series Há quanto tempo, from 2019/2020,  consisting of an extensive set of posed portraits, where friends and acquaintances are presented  from the back or sitting slightly to the side, allowing only a small part of the face to be visible,  presenting another side of the situation in which there is a lack in the image. Colors, beyond yellow,  brown, and gray, emerge indicating the present quality of time, announcing a reunion of the painter  with what he depicts. 

Finally, we can enter into an endless puzzle game about what it means to choose not to expose the  face in this series, or even about the revolutions of form to which other faces and images of Pedro  Ivo have been subjected through his pictorial endeavors. Is it something related to what Nuno  Ramos said when he stated that <known faces gradually concentrate into a single face> [13],  agreeing with the idea of condensation that Pedro Ivo referred to? Or is it a way of granting the  portrait a new power that, as Didi-Huberman would say, is obtained through images that are  creating places in the world, which he calls the <power of the negative>: There is a work of the  negative in the image, a <shadow> effectiveness that [...] digs into the visible and wounds the  legible. [14] 

Therefore, it is not as if any implied meaning needs to be clarified. As if any of the stains resulting  from the breaking of parts of the head and body, transforming into signs – a point emphasized by  Pedro Ivo – need to be reassembled to be recognized as a face. The meanings given to what is seen  and transformed through painting are part of the very uncertainty of life. What is written here is  nothing more than musings around a body of work in which a vital experience prevails over the  enigma that is the spirit of the existence of the image.

Curated by Ralph Gehre. 

[1] The choice was to look at the images produced by Pedro Ivo Verçosa, with special attention to  his paintings created from 2005 to 2020, as they are considered to remain the place of excellence for  his exercise of image-making. He himself considers this when he states that working with other  media and languages distances him from painting for a time, producing new meanings when he  returns to it: “And when I return to painting, I see new ways of generating and resolving the image I  am producing.” 

[2] VERÇOSA, Pedro Ivo. Intervalos. 2011. 51 p. Master's thesis (Master's in Visual Arts).  University of Brasília, Brasília, 2011. p. 30. 

[3] DELEUZE, Gilles. Francis Bacon: lógica da sensação. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed., 2007.  p. 92. 

[4] VERÇOSA, op. cit., p. 8. 

[5] DELEUZE, op. cit., p. 91. 

[6] RAMOS, Nuno. Cujo. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1993. p. 31. 

[7] MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. O olho e o espírito: seguido de A linguagem indireta e as vozes  do silêncio e A dúvida de Cézanne. São Paulo: Cosac&Naify, 2004. p. 35. 

[8] Ibid., p. 16. 

[9] DUBOIS, Philippe. O ato fotográfico e outros ensaios. Campinas, SP: Papirus, 1993. p. 161. [10] VERÇOSA, op. cit., p. 7. 

[11] MERLEAU-PONTY, op. cit., p. 42. 

[12] Idem ibidem. 

[13] RAMOS, op. cit., p. 23. 

[14] DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. Diante da imagem: questão colocada aos fins de uma história  da arte. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2013. p. 189.