I am now on my way to Graa Morais studio in Costa do Castelo. A friend is coming with me.

Like her, he is from Trs-os-Montes, and they talk about that as initiates talk of their initiation and temple. Then, the artist starts showing us her art. We look at photographs from newspapers and then at the works she created from them (imitation in the Aristotelian sense, iconic quotation and metaphysical plagiarism in my terms). Suddenly, the studio is the world. Suddenly, the studio is fear. She speaks and shows. Shows and speaks. She speaks of the mother as origin, source, soil, memory. She speaks of life and these days denial of it. She speaks, and points to a drawing: in it, a man carries another man in his arms. Then, she says: In the present crisis, we all carry someone on our arms: someone who is unemployed, homeless, sick, depressed or abandoned. In one of his most frightening parables, Franz Kafka tells that leopards have broken into temple and drank from the sacred pitchers. That profanation kept happening regularly and methodically, thus becoming predictable. It was eventually incorporated into the ritual as part of the celebration. We are living in a time between two times: the time of being afraid of / surprised by horror, and the time of its acceptance / normalisation. In this time between two times, it is our responsibility to prevent both the acceptance of the inacceptable and the profanation of the sacred. It is our duty to thwart the banality of evil (Hannah Arendt). Sophia de Mello Breyner, whom Graa greatly admires, writes: We do not accept evil as unavoidable. Like Antigone, the poetry of our time says: I am the one who learned not to yield to disasters. There is a desire for rigour and truth that is intrinsic to the poems deepest structure and cannot obey a false command. The artist is not, and never has been, an isolated man living on the top of an ivory tower. The artist, eschew though he may sociability, shall necessarily influence, through his work, the lives and fates of others. Even if the artist elects isolation as most fitting to the purpose of work and creation, he will, by the simple fact of producing a rigorous, truthful and conscious work, contribute towards the development of a common consciousness. Even though it may deal with nothing but rocks or breezes, the artists work always tells us this: We are more than just animals harassed into a struggle for survival; we are, by natural right, the inheritors of the freedom and dignity of being. These works by Graa Morais are the token of a responsibility and a duty. They are made of warning and alarm. But that warning and alarm contain the possibility that Kafka may not be entirely right when he states: [There is] hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. In the words of Walter Benjamin, It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

Graa Morais
PrESEnTATion
Marina Bairro ruivo

The Disasters of War

Os Desastres da Guerra [The Disasters of War], paintings and drawings by Graa Morais, will be the first temporary exhibition for 2013 at the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation. Curated by Joo Pinharanda, the exhibition is sponsored by the EDP Foundation, thus continuing a fruitful partnership that began in 2008 and has since brought to our museum a number of exhibitions by Portuguese artists: Mrio Cesariny, Antnio Sena, Fernando Lemos, and now Graa Morais. Both Graa Morais and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva have used and metamorphosed pictures cut from newspapers and magazines since their childhood and youth, arranging and disarranging the world, each in her own way. Both have painted and drawn, in different times, the disasters of war. The Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation wishes to express its warmest gratitude to the EDP Foundation, its Administrative Board and, in particular, to Cultural Director Jos Manuel dos Santos and Joo Pinharanda, the exhibitions Curator, who have brought this project to completion. We are grateful to all who made this exhibition possible, namely to the collectors who lent works to the exhibition and to Montepio Geral for its generous support. Finally, we thank painter Graa Morais for the verve and optimism she has brought to this event, for her lucid gaze that sees past the difficulties and insists on always doing right. in Flight from Chaos and the Abyss. Millions of human beings migrate in search of a better world. They flee wars, genocides, terrorism and natural catastrophes, in a crusade against hunger, disease, social injustice and political persecutions. Through these paintings, i carry out an in-depth consideration of the endurance of men and women who search for their place on Earth, refusing the inescapability of Fear and the indignity of Evil. Paintings in which men and women transmute into animals. Animals that become heroically strong. Angels who carry in their arms beings rescued from Hell and from the disasters of war and disease. Piets that reveal human nature as it refuses to accept the inescapability of the faceless iniquity that darkens the Earth. These paintings and drawings are my cry of warning and disgust at a world i see through newspapers, TV and other media, and which i also feel in the eyes of the people i see in my everyday life, in a complicity of gazes, with great dignity but also great suffering.

THE LonG WALk oF FEAr

Graa Morais

SHADoWS oF FEAr
Graa Morais

THE END DEPARTING MAN I will not carry you again on my shoulders, Father, as I OF THE MYTH did many, many years ago, when we left behind our burning city, destroyed by
Antonio Tabucchi the enemy. Long was the path I trod then, do you remember? You weighed on my shoulders with the lightness of a feather, worn by the years and sorrows. Then, you told me to stop, craving eternal rest, and I went on towards the West, because it is on the Earths West that the hope of a new civilisation lies, thus Fate willed it. I carried nothing with me, I was bringing to the West our East, the East whence everything comes, daylight and faith, the pompous, fanatic and warm East, the East where who knows? God may really exist, commanding everything Your lamp had gone out, and so did my past. I went on my way, taking my son by my hand. CHORUS Hurry, the ship is about to sail away, we must weigh anchor, time presses. DEPARTING MAN Father, I must leave, Ascanius is already aboard. CHORUS May your son not know you are leaving! Unwary, he sleeps on the ground, still warm from the fires; we cannot take him with us: the West wants no children; at most, it accepts the strength of their arms. FATHER (murmuring) Why has nobody listened to Cassandra? CHORUS Because one cannot rebel against Fate; Laocoon tried to, and the gods sent two sea-serpents that strangled him, and his sons, in their coils. These same gods have sent the fire-bellied horse to destroy our ways and bring us their own, which they call democracy. DEPARTING MAN Their democracy is smoky ruins, despair and ashes, and from all this they shall draw much money, for the war they wage is business. CHORUS Come, foolish man ready to leave, make use of our ship, you are no hero, no longer a citizen, no longer even a man, only a migrant. FATHER You must go, Aeneas. CHORUS Once, Aeneas was his name; Anonymous is his name now. Anonymous, do you perchance carry any documents showing you to be somebody? DEPARTING MAN Father, shall I never see you again? FATHER You met me once in the Elysian Fields, when the Sybil led you to Hades. With her, you crossed the Styx and thrice embraced my shade.
2

A short play, from a painting by Graa Morais

(From Gatan Martins de Oliveiras Portuguese translation)

everything is death, night and sharp edges (No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy, the painter stated). Anselm Kiefers is the Todesfuge, which brings to us Paul Celan: Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night / we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening / We drink and we drink () we shovel a grave in the air there you wont lie too cramped () he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air / He plays with his vipers and daydreams / Death is a master from Germany. This cycle by Graa Morais, made up of two series, shares this ancestry, this genealogy, this lineage. Its arms compose a heraldry of admonition and protest. To the cruelty of the world, she opposes the cruelty of the worlds image her tragic expressionism full of alarm and revulsion. The painter tells that, in her youth and as so many others, she went to Paris to see paintings. While visiting museums, she wondered what she could do with all those images that haunted her eyes. One day, she went to see The Tree of Wooden Clogs, and that film answered her question. She decided to leave the city of all futures for the land of all pasts her birthplace, Trs-os-Montes. In that lofty hour, Graa became who she was and learned what she already knew: the soil that feeds us with its fruits also hosts the worms that consume us. She knows that the human and the inhuman are mixed, but that it is necessary to recognise them, tell them apart, separate them and name them. That chemical process, a kind of spiritual electrolysis, is what we may call morality. The present cycle marks, in Graas long and continuous body of work, the clear emergence of a metamorphosis. Art, which is the life of forms, lends form here to the fear of the world. The thread running through all the phases (I use phases in the same sense as in phases of the moon) in Graa Morais work is described by Alberto Moravia, while discussing the author of Accattone and The Gospel According to St Matthew, as follows: Pasolini wrote that piety was dead. He saw piety in the sense of a religious connection to reality, that is to say, the opposite of the impiety he saw as triumphant in mass hedonism. If we look at Graa Morais work from its dawn to its dusk, we will acknowledge that a sacred outlook on reality is its watchword. By showing disasters, destructions, destitutions, wrecks, victories, dominations, joys and pains, the painter creates here a theology/anthropology for our time (in this series, the Piet is a recurring subject). Here, the grimace of the victorious athlete is close to the grimace of the defeated prisoner. Here are the dead and the living, murderers and murdered, escapees and refugees, persecuted and persecutors, executioners and victims, guilty and innocent, mothers and children, angels and demons. Here is violence, cruelty, exaltation, panic, persecution, flight, terror, suffering and pity. Here is the misery of the world, the violence of life, the mask of death. Here are beasts that are men and men that are beasts. Here is everyone, but not everyone is worth the same.
7

THE TIME Do we recognise ourselves in them or do they recognise themselves in us? OF THE ASSASSINS By answering this question, we define our place in the world. These works
Jos Manuel dos Santos say our name, speak our language, gaze at us with our gaze. They carry us in their movement and their halts: we flee in their flight, freeze in their fear, suffer in their suffering. About them, we can speak of fear and pity the same subjects Aristotle discussed while discussing tragedy. Graa Morais work, which comes from a world that is (or seems to be) a world without time (the eternal world of the earth, with its slowness and returns), falls abruptly, with the cycle presented here, into the most present of times to lend it a face (Tu pintura es el lenzo de Vernica / de ese Cristo sin rostro / que es el tempo [Your painting is the Veronicas Veil / of that faceless Christ / that is time], Octavio Paz). Every age has seen itself as standing on the verge of the abyss, Walter Benjamin tells us. But that does not mean that, in certain times, the abyss will not become more abyssal (abyssus abyssum invocat): even though the serpents egg is sometimes found where you least expect it, the time of the trains that stopped at Auschwitz is not the time when the Empress Sissi travelled across the land, escorted by her ghosts. The dogs are still playing in the yard, but the quarry will not escape them, never mind how fast it is running through the forest already, Kafka tells us, and his icy words are pointed at us. These pastel and charcoal drawings by Graa Morais (painted drawings and drawn paintings) are made from the images that daily confront us on newspaper pages and TV screens, and whose flow we are unable to stop or turn back. However, in these drawings the artist lends symbolism to sensationalism, depth to superficiality, solemnity to vulgarisation, perenniality to the ephemeral. And also attention to indifference, proximity to distance, refusal to acceptance, and a value judgement to the judgement of reality. This is the time of the ASSASSINS, Rimbaud announces. This is that time made our own. Suddenly, as in last summer or next winter, everything leapt at us like the hunting dogs of that Prague Jew who was unable to glimpse a light in his darkness. This movement that pushes us towards the abyss, towards catastrophe, towards the desert is something we call crisis. I have called it, once: the war of all against all. In this war, the law is laid upon us by the army of credit and debt and it is a martial law, a bellicose Big Brother, a planetary extermination camp. Everything is subjected to this law: politics, society, culture, humanity. Under its sway, every house has a gallows, every company is a theatre of war, every person is a target. The history of painting features many disasters of war. Goyas, which bear that same title, are composed of cruelty and chaos. Vieira da Silvas (Le Dsastre or La Guerre) bear Paolo Ucellos lances. Manets are the various versions of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian; they display memories of Goyas The Third of May 1808, as well as of the photographic recordings of the firing. Picasso has his Guernica (with its many preparatory sketches), in which

CHORUS The Sybil is long dead, and Hades has closed its doors. All that is left is the bottom of the Mediterranean, on which the corpses of luck-forsaken migrants rot. FATHER And after the third embrace my shade explained to you the doctrine of cycles and rebirths that rules the universe. Comforted by my words, you reached Italy, a land of barbarians, and founded Rome, the civilisation out of which Europe emerged. CHORUS Old man, there is nothing left to found. Nowadays, the Europe born of the city founded by your son no longer welcomes intruders; fiercely amalgamated, its coastal fleet surveys every landing, sinks ships as lowly as our own; these once-barbaric creatures have grown rich, some more, some less, because the rich need the poor, for without them the rich would never be rich. But the rich who rule there do not want people that are poorer than their own poor, otherwise their wealth would lose value, disturbing the balance between rich and poor that sustains their society. Hurry on board, poor migrant; the passage we offer you, at our own risk, costs you only two thousand pieces, in present currency precisely the same amount paid by an Italic native to get in a steamship to the Americas, a Germanic to flee to Argentina, a Lusitanian to hop the border. And now, that they find themselves well secured within the boundaries of a common space, the doors of Schengen are hard to open. They have landed on the Moon, and the planets did not oppose them. Yet, it is forbidden to disembark on the shores of the Schengen Fortress. DEPARTING MAN What of our Myth, Father? FATHER I do not know. CHORUS Once, the Myth was the nothing that is everything. Nowadays, it is simply nothing. Let us depart. The above are the unsaid words of the figures in a picture by a Portuguese painter in a bright evening of the summer of 2011, in an old house of Costa do Castelo, in Lisbon. While contemplating it, I heard their voices and now I turn them into writing, adding nothing to them.

GRAA MORAIS: ART What we ask from Art is the possible eternity: the survival, within the limAND THE PRESENT its of human time, of the memory of an individual, generation or civilisaJoo Lima Pinharanda tion. However, eternity will not be attained via the creation of an immobile scene, but through the repetition of the ephemeral, while confronting the past and acknowledging the present. Each time has its own time, and that is what is preserved for future memory. The work of Graa Morais deals with Time and Place. Its image has grown out of her inquiries into memory and changing realities, like the one of rural Portugal, as it changed and lost its time and place in the World. Through it, we saw the region of Trs-os-Montes as it clung to the distant sky, to the harsh air, to the violence of a forgotten beauty. The two series shown here, in spite of showing links to certain other moments in her previous work, clearly convey a sense of civic indignation. Graa Morais is no longer reacting simply to a present that is losing its past, but to a present that is also losing its future. Graa Morais long and intense rural scenes looked at a world that was slowly disaggregating; they were an act of preservation, a tribute. Now, they are a denunciation, a warning. Time, here, is immediate and so is space and both of them are about to fall on us. And yet each of these pictures she throws at us takes up again, repeats and quotes faces, gestures and scenes that have been taken up again, repeated and quoted by many other artists throughout history, as they turned the everyday into something that could endure beyond the moment of a scream by turning it into images, symbols. The rawness of the drawing and the harshness of colour, the absence of backgrounds and the weight of the figures are both features and resources: the overlapping lines, the colours that miss the limits of the drawing, the backgrounds that remain naked, waiting for more blood or for some cloudless blue. Graa Morais work contains a reinvented Expressionist tradition that has never achieved a similar degree of exasperation in the Portuguese painting that precedes it; and that exasperation is also not present in Portuguese literature or music. Why do we look for the sky, if it has such violent colours? Why do we raise up a body, if it is meant for crucifixion? Why is flesh displayed for ritualised sex? Where do these masked, horned, demoniclooking men lead us? And what about the butcher knives and sharp hoes? Perhaps this exasperation present in Northern European painting or in European and non-European archaic expressions, but used by Graa Morais as if it were an inherently Portuguese trait will release an ancient memory. A repressed memory, that surfaces in folk versions of pagan festivities (in the Carnival celebrations of Trs-os-Montes, for instance) and in precise moments of rural everyday life (whenever a beast or man is killed, whenever a woman is raped, whenever a fire is started and a hayloft burns). A memory which the dominant culture (first Catholic, then urban) tries to keep dormant or hidden under the cloak of the inevitability of work, of the need for patience, of the sanctification of pain, of social peace, of customary civility.

Deliver us, O Lord, from Famine, Pestilence and War

(medieval prayer)

Where do they lead us, these bodies bent over the earth, sowing, waiting and then plucking the fruits, bent over their laps, weaving or threshing, on bent knees, praying or suffering? I believe that they take us directly to the images the artist is currently exploring: to the indignant ones of urban squalor, to the hungry and the angry, to the ones sacrificed in the small wars that proliferate like endemic diseases, to the sacrificial scenes and the pitiful sights in which each man and each woman repeat the gestures of all men and all women in all the cities that were besieged, burned, destroyed: Babylon, Troy, Persepolis, Cartage, Stalingrad, Berlin, Hiroshima, Sarajevo, Baghdad... These are gestures of death and gestures of love: each one of us, a murderer; each one of us, a figure in a piet. Graa Morais uses photos from the press as a source. But she could just as well use pictures of works by Picasso or Manet, Delacroix or Goya, David or Velzquez, Caravaggio or Michelangelo, Van Eyck or Uccello, the sculptures of the Dying Gaul or the Galatian Suicide, she could echo Orpheus loss of Eurydice, Achilles pain over Patroclus, Aeneas saving Anchises, Judith slashing Holophernes neck, the tender embrace of Elizabeth and Mary, Christs weight on his Mothers loving arms because the most effective among these photos from the press are the ones that coincide with the stereotypes of pain and sacrifice, violence and compassion which the literary and theatrical, oral and visual images of Western culture have been defining since its beginning. Any image is part of history and creates its own story. Graa Morais changes scales, spaces, gestures, positions, directions and protagonists. She does everything to attain a truth of her own, which she hopes will become universally acknowledged. But, as always, fictional constructions are the ones that most efficiently carry us to the heart of reality. Between Goyas The Third of May 1808 and Picassos Guernica, let us look at The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, painted by Manet in 1869 after witnesses descriptions. If we compare the photos and written reports used by the artist with the painting he created, we will see that all the compositional elements have been changed from their sources, making the connections between the documented fact and the painted version almost unrecognisable. Yet, it is the painting that brings us closer to reality, it is the painting that eternalises the event as another moment in the choreography of power and fall, of death and sacrifice, that allows us to transcend the personal, the political, and even the historical, bringing that which happened (the isolated fact) into the bigger picture of human tragedys deeper meanings. Graa Morais discourse is coincident with history. However, by using images of the dangers, fears and shadows that dog our steps, break into our homes and assault us in the streets of every city in the world, she manages to isolate and highlight particular elements in them, composing new situations that bring her closer to a trans-historic truth. If we become aware of that deep truth, we will drive away the shadows and conquer the fears of our leaden days: such is the painters wish for her painting.
5