" Today, one of Manuel Casimiro’s most representative artworks was pre-inaugurated at Fundação Casa de Mateus, in Vila Real: O Jardim Pintado [The Painted Garden] — a project from 1992, materialized and exhibited for the first time in 1996 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, followed by a second installation at Fundação de Serralves in 1997. From December 3 onwards, you can see it in a magnificent field adjacent to the so-called Jardim das Coroas. It is not an appropriation of a Zen garden but rather the translation of a fundamental index of Japanese culture to the mental and artistic universe of Western Europe in an era in which the modernisms and avant-gardes shamed since Hiroshima were giving way to a mix of irony and melancholy that is conventionally called ‘postmodern condition’. We can, on the other hand, and without effort, see in this ‘Casimirian’ garden a tribute to the first and surprising encounter between Portuguese and Japanese in the distant year of 1541 or 1543. The polished lightness of three black marble ovoids placed on an immense gravel carpet simultaneously marks the proximity and difference in the affections and thoughts of two peoples separated by geography and united by memory. The Douro landscape and the Baroque context of Casa de Mateus guarantee this artwork the visitation it deserves.

The guiding thread of practically all the works that Manuel Casimiro has created since 1969 is a kind of ironic mystery with a post-structuralist nature, which the author calls, for convenience of language, ‘ovoids’.

The strangeness of these oval shapes, primarily black but sometimes also blue, yellow, red and, more recently, gold, was a reason for reflection by at least forty writers, including philosophers, historians, art critics and European novelists, from which I highlight names such as Agustina Bessa-Luís, José Régio, Eduardo Lourenço, José Augusto França, Bernardo Pinto de Almeida, Paulo Cunha e Silva, Jean-François Lyotard, Pierre Restany, Jean-Hubert Martin, Michel Butor, Vincent Descombes, Christine Buci-Glucksman, René Prédal, Giulio Giorello, José Luis Molinuevo and Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield.

If any metaphor were capable of synthesizing the work of the most genuine Portuguese postmodern artist, it would perhaps be an eagle flight at various altitudes and speeds over the very artistic creation offered democratically to the masses through what Walter Benjamin called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

There is, however, a delicious paradox, perhaps very anti-Benjaminian, in Manuel Casimiro’s work. Using an inspired anthropological category by Alfred Gell, I would say that the ‘index’ that marks the presence of a work by Manuel Casimiro, the ovoid to which those who wrote about the said ‘index’ attributed more than sixty synonyms, due to its sublime presence, makes the ‘unique work’ reborn, so to speak, in a kind of sensitive ubiquity that reveals the work and the author intervened and the author who intervenes giving birth to a new artwork. This challenge to the announced industrial destruction of the aura prolongs, although in another universe of references, the rescue initiated by Andy Warhol. After all the death sentences, art continues to emerge from the nominalist rubble of anti-art.

But, perhaps better than me, an essayist, critic and poet, like Michel Butor (Cf. “Météore” in Colóquio arte, n.64, 1985), was able to make us feel and think at the same time the ‘Casimirian’ ovoid as what it is: a rare moment of true originality:

l’oeil de l’affamé

l’oeil de l’ange-absinthe

l’oeil de l’aveugle

l’oeil de l’encre

l’oeil de la colombe

l’oeil de la foule

l’oeil de la nuit blanche

l’oeil des astres morts

l’oeil des découvreurs

l’oeil des dieux vieillis

l’oeil des peintres

l’oeil des prophètes

l’oeil du corbeau

l’oeil du fauve

l’oeil du miracle

l’oeil du mur

l’oeil du phénix

l’oeil du sourd

Why did Jean-François Lyotard spontaneously see himself in the work of Manuel Casimiro when, in Nice, he told him that in his artwork, he saw what he was thinking about art? Perhaps (that’s what I did) we should start with what the father of philosophical reflection on postmodern times wrote in the book that contains his complex but fundamental doctoral thesis, Discours, Figure:

“Ce livre-ci proteste: que le donné n’est pas un texte, qu’il y a en lui une épaisseur, ou plutôt une différence, constitutive, qui n’est pas à lire, mais à voir ; que cette différence, et la mobilité immobile qui la révèle, est ce qui ne cesse de s’oublier dans le signifier.” (Lyotard, J-F, 1971). "

via thecuratorsblog.com