Portrait City
by João Paulo Cotrim
Essay for the Fullerton catalogue, Lisbon Bedeteca
Such is the nature of coincidences. If they do not occur just so, they're mere crossroads of occasions; their function in the maps of our days is to distract us from what really matters, and to take us to dead ends. Truly meaningful coincidences -- which is to say, those that lead somewhere -- must happen along the lines of the illustration that will become, I'm certain, an emblem of Fullerton. Jorge Colombo and I had been working on this show for months with the determination one saves for important things, yet all the while ignoring our own plans, instead operating with the exact slowness those things require in order to truly blossom. Only close to the end, jammed with assignments, did Jorge decide to come up with an illustration for the show's invitation card. And he ended up creating one of his best, one that's an invitation to enter more than just an exhibition, but to step into his very oeuvre. In the book of images you're holding, this picture illuminates pages 56 and 57, but beyond the illustration's contaminating function as a postcard, it should work as a postscript, maybe an introduction, maybe flap copy, back cover blurb, spine -- and the only way to perform such tasks right now, all at once, is in the paragraphs that follow.
It's nighttime, and that's why the heavy blue sky presses down a row of North American buildings. The foremost among them, a dark mass highlighted by subtle reflections on the windows, plays as a stage to the "haughty solitude" of a water tower and a man. What is he doing there? Is he drawing, which is to say, gathering images? Is he reading poems aloud, which is to say, throwing words? Between the buildings we see a river, calmly cruised by a boat. Like an answer to it, an airplane seems as still as a stamp on a letter. The clarity of this chiaroscuro moment focuses on yet another vehicle, a deeply American yellow taxicab; on the curtain-less windows that offer us the lines of a naked loft; and, finally, on the humble spots of two street lights. On the melancholic skyline of this landscape reigns the human figure where all questions meet. Again: what is he doing there? Is something happening? Is that his apartment? Is the cab waiting for him? Did he miss the plane? Did he decide to stay? Is he staking out the other early riser? Is he just the doorman, arms crossed in insomnia? How many stories are condensed in this deadly still instance of life?
This Place and No Other
Created for a postcard, this illustration contains all the ingredients that Jorge Colombo (b. Lisbon, Portugal, 1963) uses to build an artistic body of work, somewhere between diaries, travel writing, and pictorial urban portraiture. To that purpose he uses eternal conflicts between night and day, light and shadow, interiors and exteriors, body and landscape, detail and whole, fidelity and reinvention, fiction and reality.
Linger on this specific image. Light is Jorge Colombo's primary working tool. It's where the mystery of his images resides. We're touched not only by the way day is announced to us, but also by how the properties of solids change with light, how things gain their personality. The main building is almost black, but in the shadows it maintains the nuance of each windowpane. All the other buildings stand apart thanks to subtle details, in a spectrum that ranges from brick color on the left, to darker brown on the right. The small picture postcard, which is usually a synonym for a common place, offers us instead a very personal horizon, which manages to give us a glimpse of interior space within its broad panorama. More: the taxicab, as well as the buildings along this side of the river, stand for a home -- "my neighborhood, my world." I have so far detected two bodies in this scene, and they are the ones that seem to justify everything; they are the pillars of the city, the ones that justify nature and enliven it. The people are mere dots, but their presence transforms the rest of the image into simply "everything else." This unsettling touch, slowly revealed, informs Jorge Colombo's ensembles, landscapes and other work. The richness of his details and the exactitude of his line work help our eyes to find a photographic peace, but it's a fake fidelity. You can infer this easily from bodies and faces: they're as far from caricature as they are from portrait. Jorge Colombo's pen interprets; it doesn't reproduce. And it's through this door that mystery enters. Apparently we are looking at a typically urban scene, but in fact we are entering the sentiment of its author. Everything he wanted to clearly show actually hides something else. It might be a secret or a banality, but it surely is the spirit of the recognizable place, the concrete poetry of objects, the palpable wisdom of a face. Such is the objective of travel literature, or at least that of travelers: to go meet the spirit, to hear the poetry, to harvest wisdom.
Hence the reconciling feeling that exudes from all of these illustrations; although they stem from internal confrontations or melancholic pop dances, their sense is that of a New Yorker bossa murmuring about well being.
Discovering America
"Although I am surrounded by breathtaking illustrated fictions -- J.C. Denis' bad dreams, the incredibly exact verbosity of Peter Bagge, Seth's romantic pseudo-fiction, De Crécy's and Chomey's painful live flesh -- to create imaginary characters, and to state my points through fictitious or disguised story lines, is something I personally have very little interest in doing," says Colombo. "Quite often, I actually think that plot is overrated. The Coen Brothers are a classic example: in 'Barton Fink', or 'The Big Lebowsky', the exposition of characters and ambiances is always perfect, but then they ruin it all with little artificial stories, struggling to tie all the loose ends at the final reel. Robert Mitchum used to make fun of Joseph Losey as the kind of filmmaker who would get a bit bored while humans were on camera, but as soon as he had a well-furnished room or a sweeping staircase to shoot, he'd be in heaven. My reaction was, what's wrong with that? So many amazing poems have been written about staircases, or fireplaces, or jackets. Why should we keep adding made-up plots and invented dialogues?
"I would be much happier pursuing the ways of Jorge Luis Borges' fake literary essays and historical investigations. Or stick to the effective brevity of some pop songs -- not fiction but statements. I would kill to have written a moment like Momus' 'David Hamilton,' or Barbara's 'Mes Hommes', or Caetano Veloso's 'Sampa.' For the time being, I'll keep doing portraits & landscapes." (1)
For quite a long time, even before discovering America in the late '80s, Colombo had been doing portraits & landscapes, even if some portraits were written ones, and some landscapes were typographical ones; the common thread was minutia and verbosity.
Let's leap over his childhood in a couple of sentences, to arrive to his public debut as a writer in the late '70s. Jorge and his brother, Vasco (three years younger, and also an illustrator and designer, working in Lisbon), children of a middle-class couple ("discreet left, intellectual stimulation but no artistic precedents in the family"), used to live in the Lisbon suburbs of Algés and Linda-a-Velha, where, along with reading magazines like Tintin and Mundo de Aventuras, they were mentored by their neighbor, illustrator Victor Mesquita.
After an uninspired stint at Lisbon's School of Fine Arts, where only Professor Lagoa Henriques' classes interested him, to likely no one's surprise he picked comics and graphic novels as the subject to write about for publications such as Tintin, JL, and Se7e (a sort of '80s Lisbon apolitical Village Voice). For the latter he provided polemical criticism, not just of the work in question, but also of the leading personalities and unique behavior endemic to such universes. He was strongly influenced by the "opinionating torrentiality" of writers such as Philippe Garnier, a Frenchman in Los Angeles fascinated by the North American cultural landscape; and Fernando Assis Pacheco, a brilliant reporter, poet, and literary critic with a strong visual slant.
Early on, Colombo was also invited by Maria Armanda Passos to illustrate her magazine, Plural; editor António Mega Ferreira brought him to JL, the cultural newspaper. Meanwhile, Colombo kept working everywhere as an illustrator, or as a designer: the third of his careers. In the '80s, he kept active in Lisbon designing book and record covers (notably for the Portuguese translations of Brett Easton Ellis and Raymond Carver, and several albums by songwriter Sérgio Godinho) and, most prominently, creating the first incarnation of O Independente, the weekly newspaper. Besides designing a publication that became a Portuguese editorial landmark, he gave illustration a unique role on its pages, jumpstarting the careers of countless authors with new methods and criteria that gave images a dignity forgotten until then.
In 1988 he met the Texan artist Amy Yoes in Lisbon. One year later, he went to visit her in Chicago, and he did not come back. "We traveled together more than half of the states of the union. We got married in 1991; until the end of 1996 we lived in Chicago, Illinois; we spent two years in San Francisco, California; and in 1998 we arrived to New York City." (2)
Everything he had done thus far proved to be preparatory work. It was from the USA that he started sending local chronicles to Expresso magazine, as well as penning a short story for Marie Claire, and 'The Shadow City,' his portrait of Chicago; the USA was the subject of 'Tamanho Grande' ('King Size'), a children's book that novelist and editor Inês Pedrosa had him write, illustrate, and publish, full of colors (purple skies, yellow cabs) and detailed descriptions of foods ... and of landscapes. It was in the USA that he worked as the art director for the newspaper NewCity and San Francisco magazine, redesigning both during his tenures. He became fascinated by the North American urban landscape, all the while publishing illustrations in the pages of Chicago, The Village Voice, Pulse!, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, Playboy, or Worth. Indeed, the fifty-plus original images shown in Fullerton are the main avenue of such work, sketched on location and then re-drawn with a Rapidograph pen and rendered in watercolors on Arches paper, in "colors seldom true to reality."
An Active Inaction
In his luggage Colombo carried affinities with Hergé or Joost Swarte, which meld with so many others to get tangled among names that stand for lines and details: Tardi's buildings, the prolific elegance of Javier de Juan, Hockney's experimentalism, Loustal's landscape atlas, Yan Nascimbene's watercolor memories, Floc'h and his iconographic manipulations, Pierre Le-Tan's spleen, Maurice Vellekoop's behavioral observations, Gluyas Williams' geniality, Abner Dean's line clarity, Hopper's American essence, Mário Botas' icons, Wenders' locations, Eggleston's unpredictable glance, and, of course, the informative and enlightened 'torrentiality' of Philippe Garnier, who 'translates' into French each and every one of North America's myths. It's a fertile land, which can feed an obsession, not unlike the early-century Ilustração Portuguesa that photojournalists used to have: cities, their flora and fauna and geology, which is to say, portraits & landscapes, of Chicago mostly, but also of New York.
"When I discovered Javier de Juan," says Colombo, "I felt bad for treating Lisbon with such indifference in my own drawings. Then I switched cities, and I promised I would never again be so rude to a city that hosted me." (3)
This work is the result. These are frozen instants with minimal action, nothing more than a head turning or a body almost running. Voluptuousness occurs, yes, but in the description of urban furniture, in the insides of airplanes, in the rendering of bicycles, in the lines of automobiles. The work's reason for existing is the juxtaposition of architectures, the unexpected combinations of street corners, the cozy comfort of stores, the unbroken silhouette of a fence, the dance of lights: "Even when I'm not carrying a sketchbook and a pen, facades and roofs come into my eyes, lost in the maze of fire escapes, the haughty solitude of water towers, the ancient brick and glass vertigo, or the shabby shelters in the middle of parking lots." (4)
The work has an ambulatory tone, that of an attentive, omnivorous wanderer. It becomes more explicitly diary-like in the images of interiors, built of calibrated framings, and the interplay of patterns, as well as in its literary depiction of privacy, always harmonic even as it narrates disorder. Again, the frozen everyday scenes, sometimes just waiting for their actors, at other times deserted by their departure, and at others still, merely accounting for their passage. Just another step toward the face-portraits. And here's where occur moments other than those of a melancholy reveling in observation. Only through the faces of friends and passersby do we reach other feelings, other opinions. For Jorge Colombo's cities are a tranquil surface, a haiku that only through effortful reading reveal the turbulences that feed a city: "Everything comes to me with memories attached, with dents from the past: ancient American cities have very scruffed streets, where no detail matches another. There's always a visual short-circuit flickering, an intriguing incongruence between intentions and results." (5)
His new project is that of a hunter: searching for citizens to represent a city's face. It's called The Dailies. "Every day I spot in the streets of New York an interesting character," he reports, "I take detailed notes on clothing and posture, and I make a quick portrait at home. Page after page in my albums, I'm starting to create a collective portrait of the average New Yorker that's very interesting." (6)
Curiously, this brings back, somehow, a characteristic of Colombo's work prior to his discovery of America: human figures in elegant outlines and tense harmonies that ended in beautiful hands. Fingers like buildings.
(1) April 11, 1999 e-mail
(2) April 28, 1999 e-mail
(3) April 11, 1999 e-mail
(4, 5) 'Chicago: A Cidade Sombra,' Marie Claire, 1994
(6) May 15, 1999 e-mail
Translation by Jorge Colombo and Marc Weidenbaum. © 1999 João Paulo Cotrim. All rights reserved
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