Fernando Huici
ln the recent and beautiful cycle of ten carborundum etchings that David de Almeida has included under the enigmatic and evocative title of Sinais de Tufão or Typhoon Signals, there is a print that stands out clearly from the rest in terms of both its name and its visual identity.
It is the one among all of them which, with the most explicit emphasis, retains the trace of an image, which emerges like a spectre from the mountainous tide of colour, in the same way as evidence of atrocities, dreams of whales or immemorial petroglyphs appeared in other earlier series created by the artist. An emblem of circles intertwined around a shaft, this Bola preta appearing blurred in the epidermis of a milky magma has something of a diagram of a gyroscope. But at the same time, it also seems to suggest a sphere of the world, dematerialised down to the dynamic skeleton traced by the dance of the meridians in rotation, perhaps evoking that flight in pursuit of the promise of a fabulous typhoon, of the splendour of catastrophe, so beautifully narrated by the text from Luís Sá Cunha associated with this cycle. A dance, in any case, of lines that bend in space, no less imaginary in the end than that other illusion which the gaze identifies as the curve of the horizon, the perceptive limit of the cosmos and, in identical measure, the promise of a vertigo of immensity.
On 17 December 1915, the legendary Last Futurist exhibition, 0.10. opened its doors in Petrograd. Around the charismatic visionary ambition of Kazimir Malevich, the exhibition gathered a Praetorian guard that included an impressive collection of names - Klyun, Popova, Puni, Rozanova, Tatlin who were to play a leading part in the incendiary adventure of the Soviet avant-garde. Still a central star of that vertiginous planetary system, though the cracks that were to lead to the rise of a new generation were even then in the process of gestating, Malevich presented in a large personal room reserved for his work many of the key canvases that culminated the suprematist invention. Among them were those, such as Black square, which embodied the myth par excellence of a final and more radical frontier in the seed of language of modernity. And for the occasion, he also wrote a manifesto containing the following revealing passage: “ have broken the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, the ring of the horizon, in which the artist and forms are united with nature.”
ln many of the Sinais de Tufão making up the cycle and as he confesses to having done so in specific works in the four Iarge formats that complete his Madrid exhibition David de Almeida seems lo be looking back to Malevich´s paradigm of dawn. And that path which the gaze of the artist, now at the height of his maturity, has started on at this very moment does in my opinion exactly seek to redirect the course towards the sources of a dismembered modernity, the mirage of a safe haven where he can escape the roar of the storm raised up by the confusion of an end-of-the-century art. I think he is seeking quite the opposite: to look away from what is, in the end, nothing other than the annoyance of a trivial gust of wind in order to face up to the enigma of another tempest, one that is real and greater.
Hence, no doubt, the eloquent metaphor of the typhoon, of that initiating tufão yearned for by the prose of Sá Cunha. That catharsis which opens the box of thunderbolts and where is unleashed nature herself that breaks the ring of the horizon and escapes from the circle of the things, where the cosmos is unmasked as chaos and an unfathomable abyss of pure potential. Something that is not, like the dream revealed by Malevich, either the end of time or the point where roads die with no further ado. On the contrary, it was and is that which paradoxically turns out to be the finisterres, the land´s ends, the vantage point from which, if you look hard enough, you can discern an ocean without limits.
In cat. “señales de tifón”, Galería Estiarte, Madrid 1999