André Lemos

(Portuguese - Lisbon, 1971 )
A Bombordo, os robustos e descontinuados

(«To the Portside; the Robust and the Discontinued»)

Drawings

September the 24th – November the 28^th

André Lemos is a draughtsman. Even though he has worked throughout his life in other more precisely named classes and categories of drawing-making – from comics to illustration, mural painting and editorial cartoon, and numerous graphzines -, all his production is presided by the manual dexterity, the immediacy, and the urgency of drawing. All within the same body.

Even in the works he has done that would be closer to the classical narrative tenets of comics – with Quem é Este Homem? (published by Bedeteca de Lisboa in 1999), or his adaptation of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and The Ugly in O Percurtor Harmónico (Ao Norte, 2008) - the fragility of those principles were already being explored by Lemos, through the " fragmentality” of each panel, the ellipses, and the tensions between all the elements of spatiality and action. The notion of the series, in which formal and/or conceptual connections are able to forge longstanding meanings, while at the same time demolishing the linearity of reading, is something that Lemos adopted as his common turf. That is the foundation of work such as his dialog with Grosz in Super Fight II – Grosz Vs Lemos (Mmmnnnrrrg, 2002) and later on Family Portraits an An Intrusive Black Circle (both put out by his own self-publishing label, Opuntia Books, in 2007 and 2010, respectively).

We can call these experiences, to a certain extent, as being more or less coherent challenges, in which Lemos is keen on focusing on a theme, a shape or even a reaction to something external. But his work is also to be found in an immensely variety of either collective or solo shows, fairs and meetings, not to mention the numerous pages put out by a whole gamut of European independent and small presses (from the French Francis Laporte and Cotoreich to the German Re:Surgo! and the Russian Pipe & Horse), either within anthological collections or solo endeavours. These have been territories for, let’s say,

“looser” adventures, in which a tool or a path may be followed by one other, if not incompatible, at least very different. This creates the feeling that Lemos’s drawing-making is close to writing. More than that, it’s close to correspondence, to an exchange with someone else, as if Lemos is responding to a given call in very precise circumstances.

This exhibition is, to a certain point, a return to form, in a time when doubts and uncertainty are brought by words that had existed before, but now set off specific, provocative meanings: “confinement,” “social distancing,” and so on. As an avid, lively reaction to these negative dimensions, Lemos took this chance to plunge into a frenzy of creation wholly devoid of concerns about quantity, formats, sizes. It is a way to remove himself from the life of doing, the so-called socially useful productivity. He questions and is questioned by that quarter of an instant of profound doubt and fear. It is the only jump possible, of separation and of forceful obliqueness. Whether value emerges or not from this, it will be up to the visitor.

Oblique is also the way Lemos returns to the notion of series, more or less guided by a principle or a theme. The drawings found on A Bombordo; Os Robustos e Descontinuados seem to constitute an anomy, rather, scattered in multiple subject matters, composition styles and angles, figuration strategies, characters, text, scenes that can be called as such, and the very manner in which these images are able to draw in the spectator. Some of the pieces seem to respond to our contemporary moment, while others seem to be seen as that which we fictively call “The universal.” The machinic lives side by side with the organic, the graphic lies down with the oneiric, the satirical with the admonitive, the illustrative with the automatic. If drawing is a way of thinking about the world, then Lemos wants to think it wholly and completely. Or put it all into question.

The very fashion after which some of the characters inhabit the visual plane of composition, whether in a theatrical resting pose or in dynamic action, the presence of texts, and the illusion of an “episode” or a “pregnant moment” in a scene, and even those sentences that we could interpret as an alternative title, a call to arms or a frank insult, all of that is but a red herring that fosters even more uncertainty about its direction and method.

Seasoned in multiple techniques along his career, including his very recent digital collages, the pieces presented here are all Indian ink on paper, and were created exclusively for this show. Moreover, they have been done in accordance to one of the oldest and widest traditions in the world, the tradition of brush drawings.

The gesturality, the voracity, the ample attentiveness, the subjects, the sudden shifts in humour and referentiality, put Lemos into the broad constellation of the grand masters of the material indiscipline of brush drawing. Lemos is as incessant and avid in his capture of the world as Leonardo and Delacroix, Shi’tao and Hokusai, George Grosz and Anni Albers, Philip Guston and Saul Steinberg and Paul Hogarth and Brett Whiteley and Raymond Pettibon. All of them very much capable of capturing Perros’ quarter of an instant.

If one realizes that none of these correlations is paradoxical, the justness and preciseness of the descriptive title becomes clear.

Biography

André Lemos (Lisbon, 1971) is an artist, illustrator, comics auteur, small press publisher and now also a postman. His work has been published in solo and collective titles, both in Portugal and abroad. He has participated in numerous solo and colective shows. In 2006, he founded his own small press label: Opuntia Books.

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