thus the immediate and dualistic distinction between the visible and the invisible, between extension and thought, is rejected, […] since they are the obverse and the reverse of one another and both are always behind one another.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Seeing is an interplay of appearance and withdrawal. What becomes visible always carries something that eludes the gaze. Painting makes this particularly evident: covered with paint, the canvas recedes from view. Yet the image that emerges never detaches from its material ground. In the picture plane, its texture, and every trace of the brushstroke, this ground reappears as a condition of the visible. Image and support belong to a common weave that, like a translucent veil, simultaneously conceals and reveals.

In some of the paintings in this exhibition, we encounter fields of colour that take up the rectangular shape of the support. By overlapping and partially concealing one another, they bring each other into view. Without ever forming a perspectival space, they point toward a hidden background: the stretcher frame seems to emerge faintly beneath the canvas. What becomes visible here reveals itself as an impastoed echo of a shape that has been covered by paint.

In other works, the canvas is so open-pored, resistant, and rough that it remains persistently present within the image. Weave and colour merge into landscapes of indeterminate topology: luminous expanses, shifting formations, and wavering horizons. Oscillating between atmospheric dissolution and densification of matter, they evoke a dimension of seeing that precedes the formation of objects and that lies beyond the reach of our everyday perception of the world.

What the works in this exhibition share is that colour and fabric extend beyond the picture planes. Their surfaces enter into relation with the texture of the surrounding walls, their tactility with our skin. Excess fabric folds around their edges, like garments covering our bodies or bandages protecting a wound. A seam binds a canvas, as scars seal the tissue of skin.

Renato Castanhari’s work shows us that not only image and support belong to a common weave, but that they share its texture with us and the world. It is a porous weave through which the hidden continually shimmers.

Carla Lohmann-Malegiannakis