The first painting I ever saw by Guilherme Ginane depicted a chaise longue on (or in) a grey background. It makes sense to highlight the ambivalence of both positions – on and in –, because the background blended with the floor, just like the so-called seamless backgrounds in advertising photography studios. The only anchor point and reference to perspective was the shadow beneath the chaise longue.

And while, on the one hand, this shadow prevented the depicted image from being reduced to the two-dimensionality of the canvas, on the other, the background disoriented the incipient perspective in a claustrophobic, disturbing trompe-l'oeil, where the infinite was both wall and floor, transparency and opacity, full and empty at the same time. There was nothing but the chaise longue and its shadow, lost in space. And I couldn’t take my eyes off of the picture, as though trying to focus on a black hole.

It wasn’t just the chaise that got me thinking (by subject matter association) about “Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles”, which Van Gogh painted to take his revenge on the bed-rest – or, even before, the disease that left him bedridden in that room. Ginane quit advertisement for painting. If advertising was his disease, it's likely that painting is his vengeance.

Of “Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles”, Italian critic Lionello Venturi wrote that “Van Gogh (…) wished to represent sleep and could not. The tragedy of his mind was approaching, heralded by signs of derangement, and it allowed him neither rest nor sleep. Calm reigns in the abandoned room, but it is a calm without hope and without pity. (…) It is a rest that is born of despair” .

The perspective in Van Gogh’s Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles, is multiple, as though, lacking a human figure, each object had obtained the right to a singular independent point of view, as though parallel universes or dimensions coexisted in the same painting, making an unstable totality, slightly distorted by the contradiction and the incompatibility of fragmentary autonomies.

Guilherme Ginane’s objects on the tabletops also have an autonomous and oddly irreconcilable existence. The cigarettes, the matches, the flower pots, the books, etc., overlap with the table, which oscillates between background and surface; they drip like paint on the canvas, they float over the table more than rest on it; they dispute the prevalence of parallel planes and incompatible perspectives with the table. There’s a fight with painting there, that has very little to do with rest.

“I used to struggle a lot with my work. I’m getting more confident now. The plane is changing, it feels like an achievement,” Ginane told me about a year ago. “Once Paulo Pasta [his former teacher] wrote that shoegazing is an insecure gaze. I’m starting to look up and other, yet unrecognized elements are popping up, light bulbs and walls where there were once cups and carpets.

The change in plane perspective and its seeming mobility result in a metamorphosis of things: the gaze that once was laid on strips of carpet at table edges now sees walls; what once was a cup now turns into a light bulb at the top of the painting. In other words, the plane turns, bends without bending, bending as though it might turn three-dimensional, yet still remains flat, and in this idle movement (the plane that turns without turning) the objects also change. The painting embeds more than one point of view, at times even incompatible points of view, in such a way that objects turn into other objects without ceasing to be the same. This coexistence in Ginane’s painting represents an arc, a change in the gazing subject’s point of view (artist and observer), and refers to an experience in the world.

The difficulty of a background that is infinite and surface at the same time, represented by the tactile evidence of the paintbrush, of the overlapped layers of paint, already played an assertive and destabilizing role in previous works: the figures in the foreground – chairs, cigarettes, cups, etc. –, lost in space, had their point of view, their three-dimensional autonomy, halted by the shallow, two-dimensional and opaque background with which they ended up merging. Even later, when the tabletops and carpets under the tables start popping up, the two planes still blend, by a telescopic effect, into the same surface. There is a tension and a viscosity between things and planes, simultaneously diverse and still unique.

At any rate, the difficulty is less of a problem than part of the solution. It sets boundaries, points the way to the painter. When he didn’t have money to buy oil paint, Ginane started working with charcoal and opened another powerful path in his work. In his adolescence he didn’t go to school for 5 years, due to a paralyzing phobic depression. “I was afraid of the wind,” he says. He’s been to doctors, tried voodoo and ended up in a psychoanalyst's office, where he discovered abstract painting (he had discovered figurative painting with a Degas ballerina poster in the hall of the building where he used to live with his mother and brother in Meier, Rio de Janeiro).

“I was dying to paint the human figure,” he says about a boundary that remains essential in his work to this day. As in “Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles”, his paintings are still lifes where the conspicuous absence of human figure, indicated only by the silent trail of cigarettes and matches, ends up referring to the presence of the eye, of the viewer.

“Literature touches me more than contemporary art. Project art is similar to advertisement. From my point of view, painting happens in painting. There is a muteness in painting, that no words can account for,” he sums up.

As opposed to an increasingly rhetorical art, Ginane chose to name his exhibition after one of the most ironic statements (“This will have been another happy day”), uttered by a motionless woman, buried up to her neck, in Happy Days, by Beckett, a writer whose work also tends toward silence.

All life is in this absence, in the battle between planes, in the paradox of the idle metamorphosis of objects and points of view, which shifts the focus to the position and to the eye of the viewer; in this silent quality (characteristic of great paintings) of blending matter and anti-matter and of putting on the canvas, through the materiality of the paint, a dimension both visible and invisible and that moves standing still, like us before it.

Bernardo Carvalho