A Gessoed Walk in Van Gogh's Shoes

Science tells us white is what our brain sees in the presence of all visible wavelengths of light.  In other words, it’s all the color we can see at once.  But art tells us white is an achromatic shade, a color with no color.  So instead it’s really the color we don’t see.

 

Whether all or none, white, it seems, is the color of an infinite awareness.

 

And if you’re Josias Figueirido, it’s in that white we see.

 

When Josias first invited me to a sneak peek of his process for a new body of work, I showed up to find 7 freshly stretched canvases painted in white gesso.  It was unusually exciting to witness - unusual because there was really nothing there.  At least for me.  They appeared as newly erased storyboards ready for a maker’s mark, standing to his attention, slightly varied in size yet each built for something big.  But no color, or no other color. So I left anxious to see what would happen next.

 

I returned a few weeks later and there was definitely more progress all around — drawings taped to columns and windows, paint labeled on tables in a sort of programatic grid, fans and hanging plastic sheets pushing air all around.  But along the walls still sat 7 stretched, unmarked canvases.  All still attentive and waiting. All still white.

 

A few weeks later, still white.

 

And again.

 

And again.

 

But what I finally learned I could not see was the layer after layer of white gesso building, applied and sanded and applied again.  And again.  And again.  It takes months for Josias to prepare his canvases for his paintings.  Many months, in fact, for the 18-20+ layers of white gesso each canvas demands.  All to get the surface he needs to paint.  All for that white to see.

 

The layers provide not only a depth for color but a foundation for application.  Josias prefers canvas, but he likes to paint above it in a way that allows it to be viewed like transparent cels.  You can sense his paintings’ motion, and their vastness, all because the surface is almost frictionless.  I swear there is some sort of voodoo physics to it all, it feels as if tilted too far to the left or right the picture will slide right off the canvas.  It won’t.  But there’s a curiosity in thinking… what if it did?

 

The rest of the painting happens in what he also calls “layers”, an almost linear order of line and color that pulls and pushes the elements of an imagination unfurled.  The application is primarily air-brush, and even though the picture is first drafted on a computer there is still a lot of drawing and erasing and editing that happens as the layers are condensed into a frame.  He’s developed a library of symbols and characters with which he choreographs landscapes and portraits, and there is a vocabulary in each image he creates to compose a soundless language and an endless playground.  It’s both inviting and fleeting.  You absolutely want to touch it.

 

The paintings are done in series but they are all titled the same with (usually) just a number prefix to identify a count — Piri the Dreamer and Flying Coyote in the Garden.  Whether a painting on canvas or a drawing on paper or even a print in multiples, the name is the same.  And I think this might have something to do with how Josias describes them in sum, and rather matter-of-factly:

 

~ "They are self portraits."

 

As though never to be confused for someone else.

 

It’s difficult to believe that these paintings would represent an act of rebellion.  I’m reminded of Jonas Wood, Guy Yanai, Katherine Bernhardt… works more willing to yield than resist in their collage-ish, pop-ish, modern-ish figurative docility.  There is a similar flattened perspective snapping vibrant colors to recognize the fantasy of impossibly constructed norms.  And there is definitely an element of surrealism in the mythical beasts and jungle fauna nodding to a neo-Rousseau primitivism.  But rebellion??

 

Josias explains:  “I like turning the ordinary and banal into something worth focusing on, into something extraordinary.  It feels like an act of rebellion bestowing worth on things otherwise too common.  These paintings for me are like Van Gogh’s shoes.”

 

I wasn’t expecting that.

 

This has certainly been a year cloaked in rebellion. Or at least rebellion is what we’re told to merit.  History will be that final tell but today’s rebel seems less honor and more grift, actors stoking fear and hate to deflect a far less noble intent.  So to position rebellion as an act of benevolence offers, I believe, an escape to a more sovereign ambition.  And perhaps a better way forward. Imagine if the goal was always to find the most in the least.  It’s humbling.  And joyful.  We, like Piri, get to dream.

 

And so we walk in Van Gogh’s shoes to witness colors and creatures and shapes so extraordinary they will never be common.  We see lakes and trees and friends and monsters and though they are so very different from any we’ve ever seen before, we are not threatened and we are not afraid.  Perhaps because the only way to explain what you are seeing is to participate in its innocence.  This is literally nothing more than Piri and his companion Coyote in their garden.  Witness.  Sit.  Stay a while.  Leave when you’re ready.  They’ll be there when you come back, in the same spot as before.  And you will see them even more differently than before.

 

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

 

Josias is currently serving the most delicious blend of Fauve Pop at Arthaus in Latrobe, PA.  Come by and see it all happen IRL.  Bring your curiosity, and your shoes.