::: Galeria Virgílio :::

As a pool cue imparts spin (or Diego Belda’s combination shots)

How many fundamental elements in the process of painting can an artist dispense with and still call it painting? Canvas and paints, the gestures, the control, the painstaking choice of colors and shadings, the scope of intent? Is any object displayed on the wall in an exhibit space still painting? Diego Belda answers these questions with the works in the exhibit Malagueta, Perus e Bacanaço. To this artist the most important thing in painting is the gesture that transforms something into painting, and the painterly quality is in the construction of the thought, in the creation of a particular movement on a surface. Which is not all that different from shooting pool.

Shooting pool – overarching inspiration of the ensemble of works that the artist presents in this one-man show at the Galeria Virgilio – has a calculated rigor that requires one to think in terms of straight lines, flat surfaces and angles, a calculation befuddled by happenstance and hustle, and these are the elements that comprise Belda’s current work.

Four paintings constructed predominantly of felt, formica and wood; a sculpture that resembles a pool table, as well as an actual regulation pool table, arranged in the space, six conceptual paintings made from the appropriation of the cloth on all the tables at a pool hall in Campos Elíseos, the Gold Ball, where he usually plays. Thus the exhibit is not only based on associations with shooting pool, there is even the taint of the universe of João Antônio's lowlife drifting through the night – never at ease, always on the prowl -- in pool halls in Lapa, Água Branca, Barra Funda, but, first of all, from close contact with the aesthetic/ethic of the game.

“The game of pool is very formalistic. You end up going after colors. You go after the red, than you go after the yellow, then green...” Amused, the artist lets loose with that nefarious little laugh hustlers know so well. A sort of a buried chuckle, half in the mouth, half in the eyes [1]. Belda laid down certain rules for the conceiving of the exhibit, such as working only with the colors of pool. Continuing the painter/hustler litany wired to the pursuit of color: then comes brown, then comes blue, then pink, then black, each of them always mediated by white. To the colors of the balls he added the shades of wood, present in the pool cues and pool tables, and that’s it. There would be no other colors in the exhibit at all, nor any half-tones. The shapes also followed the rules of the rhythm of the game: straight lines, sequences, angles, calculation and further calculating, not without a dash of chance and cunning. Which isn’t all that different from painting.

Malagueta, Perus e Bacanaço aready served as a title for a painting in 2005 (that was shown at the MAM Panorama that year), made of felt, formica and oil on wood, and now it provides a name for the whole series of paintings, sculptures and objects on exhibit at Galeria Virgilio. João Anônio’s hustlers slam into the field of action in Diego Belda’s paintings like a hard bank shot. In the writer’s famous short story, Bacanaço is the brazen tough guy, Malagueta the washout, an aging, cynical hustler, and Perus the shy young man, three professional cue men who converge under cover of night in São Paulo to make some money shooting pool.

The circular movement of the narrative, which begins with the meeting of the three characters in Lapa as night falls, and ends with the trio’s return to the neighborhood as day breaks – so that from one escapade to the next, winning and losing, the three anti-heroes walk and walk only to end up in the same place, both literally and symbolically – is present in Belda’s work at least since his last one-man show [2]. Since then, the “post industrial neo-baroque” [3] has given way to a strategic containment, but the circularity of the works, extemporaneous as they are, remains. The new paintings have embedded within them a cyclical and diachronic time, perhaps the same that players experience even nowadays gathered around the pool table, one day after another seeming like the same day repeating itself over and over, one game after another the same as the last, and so on and on.

In Diego Belda’s recent work, art and pool have a lot in common. Silence, for example. In the bygone days of 1959, pool halls observed a reverent silence, despite the hubbub of night life. The streets outside blared with noise while the men around the table observed the silence that is reserved for the clicking of the balls. A silence reminiscent of the lowered voice in art galleries, also endowed with their own hubbub, especially at an evening’s vernissage or in visits from school groups.

Discerning such sounds one discovers to an even greater extent that the artist is creating in the junction and tension between these two universes. The very silence itself: the arrangement of the works in the gallery inhibits the conventional contemplation of works of art. There is no space to step back into to see the paintings, nor opening to stroll around the sculptures. This calculated aggressiveness is owing to the fact that the artist likes his paintings to be seen close up, because at a distance the pictorial field may impose silence, when fully apprehended. Up close, the work never ceases to move, in a constant state of tension. The two works that restore a monumental scale to the prosaic “clatter” of pool cues introduce a different sound, on the boundaries of the design. As it happens, in pool, the name of the cue sometimes becomes interchangeable with the name of the cue’s owner, at least in the writings of João Antônio. The cue personifies the player. So the cues move beyond the mundane scale to take on a human dimension. This exhibit endows Malagueta, Perus and Bacanaço with stature. Arms in the air. This is how pool sharks and big-name hustlers were saluted in the dens they frequented.

You learn to hustle by hustling, everything else is make-believe. It took many years of painting and shooting pool to peform this highly synthetic gesture of appropriating the felt from the Gold Ball tables. It might look like a con by the artist, sleight of hand, a bluff. But it’s not. The biggest con is honesty. In this unique and at first sight simple gesture there are condensed not only years of an artist’s trajectory, but many decades – if not centuries – of art history. From Da Vinci’s mental thing to Duchamp’s ready-made, ideas are transmuted into masterpieces with a single, appropriately seasoned gesture. The six green canvases whose age is measured by the interlude in which the fabric was in use are a powerful synthesis of the thought of painting: planar surfaces with a hint of volume, pure abstraction with pure narration, contemplation fused with action, a heroic scale brought low by human misery. Here are Malagueta, Perus and Bacanaço, each at a loss.

And the exhibit is not confined to this space: it extends to the Gold Ball, where new felt has been installed on the six tables that provided the fabric for Belda’s ready-made paintings. There at the pool hall, in the midst of the hustlers and anti-heroes of the São Paulo night, a painting by the artist comes full circle in the process of constructing Malagueta, Perus e Bacanaço. It can be appreciated by the gallery audience as well as the pool hall crowd, and vice-versa. Literally and symbolically, the hustlers have gone out from one point of origin and returned to it in one piece.