Anísio O. Couto: Texto Crítico: Renato Menezes

Anísio O. Couto: The Eye and the Butterfly

“(…) Now it happens that in this country (Japan) the empire of signifiers is so vast, so beyond speech, that the exchange of signs retains a fascinating richness, mobility, and subtlety, in spite of the opacity of the language, sometimes even because of that opacity.”

Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, 1970

In Anísio O. Couto’s painting, the canvas perimeter generally outlines an area akin to a table or serving tray, where the artist arranges a variety of objects. Baskets of colorful fruit (whole or sliced), teapots, cups, eyes and eggs result froma careful choreography of hands that forges a new spatial order on the plane by handling volumes. Seen from above—like an overflight that amplifies rather than reduces the objects’ scale—this table or serving tray seems to refresh Henri Matisse’s definition of painting: “For me, a painting should always be decorative.” In this formulation, the word “decorative” defines a specific—and dehierarchized—mode of articulation between figure and ground that is free from the codes of perspective and rationalist authoritarianism of line.

Space thus emerges from color, not merely as a filling of the drawing or description of the thing-in-itself, but as a means of expression and construction, aiming for a rhythmic balance of the pictorial mass without illusionism, magic, or tension between planes. Everything is where it should be. Remove one figure, add another, change the position of an object and subtly recombine shapes and colors so that something equally new is noticed from this new configuration, with both surprise and resignation (for an enduring hope remains that the vanished part might reappear in another context): thus, the painting resolves itself invariably as board games do, and structures itself as words do. Without any fixed order or protocol, the pieces move across the plane bringing dynamism to its structure and simplifying the formulation proposed by Deleuze, for whom repetition is not the production of the same but rather the engine of creation and becoming. It is from repetition that identity, singularity, and the unique arise. This possibly explains the dignity his objects proudly and confidently display.

Among all the figures that populate his works, the most striking are the eyes, which are always wide open, flattened like fried eggs (or sliced boiled eggs that appear whole when seen from above), autonomous and alive. The eyes painted by Anísio are no longer mere body parts but the entire body, or perhaps a reified concept shaped by his masterful handling of cotton swabs (tools that in his practice replace brushes). If they appeared in pairs, those neatly arranged open eyes upon the table might evoke those of Saint Lucy, the martyr whose organs were torn out — and miraculously restored by God — for refusing to renounce Christianity. In Couto's work, however, they proliferate.They take on different sizes and shapes, sometimes even shift in color, yet they never cease to watch. They remain alert and unblinking, as if always prepared to face the forbidden truth, certain that nothing could force them to turn inward or close upon themselves.

The eyes in Anísio O. Couto's paintings seem to embody an apotropaic quality, resembling an amulet intended to neutralize its opposite, the evil eye (baskania in Greek; ayin hara in Hebrew; malocchio in Italian). Just as Turks turn to nazar and Egyptians to wedjat, both referring to the healed eye of Horus, the falcon god, Brazilian popular culture has found in the seed of Mucunã (Dioclea grandiflora), commonly known as “ox-eye bean,” a powerful tool against the “covetous eye”[1]—for only an eye can fight off another. But Anísio produces his own object of protection and vigilance: a concrete form of an eye-concept, which is familiar to the ovum philosophorum (philosophers’ egg). Alchemists ascribed to this egg the role of a receptacle for the transformative power within things, analogous to the eye as a receptacle for image. In this sense, the genesis of life coincides with the genesis of the image itself. When gazing upon the eye, what is evil turns good and what is good turns better, with no chance of reversal. It is ultimately a cosmic eye whose shape replicates, on another scale, the shapes of the world and the cell, within whose depths lies life’s smallest (and greatest) unit.

In a less unusual way than it might seem, the egg-eye of transformation guides us to the butterflies—creatures for which he has a particular fondness. Just like the egg-eye, the butterfly is the final stage of a life devoted to transformation and characterized by metamorphosis. The life journey from caterpillar to butterfly, passing through the chrysalis, depicts the conversion from an earthly being into an aerial one, from dense to ethereal as a kind of opening toward the vertical becoming of ascension. For this very reason, this cycle has historically been associated with metanoia, change of mind, spiritual transformation, conversion, rebirth of a new vision and so forth. The same alchemy that perceived in the egg-eye the essential core of life also regarded the butterfly as a symbol of the process of transforming lead into gold and raw matter into spirit, through a process in which chrysalis corresponds to nigredo, cocoon to albedo, and butterfly to rubedo. Once again, a butterfly is the outcome of a devoted reification effort, whose arché lies in the Greek word psyché, meaning both soul and butterfly. In mythology, Psyche is a mortal young woman who becomes immortal after numerous trials. From her union with Eros (love) is born Voluptas (pleasure), that is, the reconciliation between soul and body.  Before Voluptas's birth, the myth is ruled by the prohibition of the gaze: Eros allows Psyche to love him but forbids her to see him. Voluptas is thus the child of the redeemed gaze. The eye and the butterfly become, more than ever, inseparable parts of the pleasure that leads to asceticism. "The eye is the window to the soul," wrote Leonardo Da Vinci.

Eyes and butterflies are fragile objects that require care and attention; they resist a full-handed touch and operate through attraction. This may explain why they appear so frequently in Anísio’s work, as he skillfully handles this type of object. In the early 2000s, he worked at a shop located on Camerino Street in downtown Rio de Janeiro that supplied feathers and marabou for Carnaval. One of his responsibilities was preparing peacock feathers, prized for their lavish colors, iridescence, and ocelli, which are patterns resembling a large eye encircled by bright rings, as well as for their delicacy due to their length, flexibility, and lightness. Working with feathers seems to have brought a heightened awareness of texture to his painting and a care for matter that resists rough handling and is responsive to patient touch only. Moreover, this experience appears to have been decisive in the way Anísio began to conceive the pictorial space as a field defined not by reformulation, but by expansion of the real—a suspended space where each composition component is gently laid on the plane, assuming a quality that is almost hieratic, hieroglyphic, and enigmatic. This quality becomes evident as we perceive variations of a single theme: the shapes of fruits, birds, fish, and teapots gradually lose their deictic, relative character and irreversibly assume their own identities, becoming what they truly are.

Anísio O. Couto paints concrete things, material objects, situations, and facts. He extensively uses the expression “this really happened,” as well as he remains unflinching before the unknown: he wants to learn, discover, see, read, and understand. Everything is material, everything is repertoire, everything is still to come and rest upon his table, like eyes and butterflies, so that one day an altar may rise from it.

Renato Menezes is an art historian and curator at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.