Fernando Lanhas
Quanto tempo o Tempo tem
  

A collection of oils, drawings, collages, painted stones and (so-called) written words come together in the unified space of an exhibition and a book to tell us how Lanhas understood the world. The exhibition, and this book that extends it, are neither a retrospective nor an anthological summary of the work (and life) of Fernando Lanhas. And yet, thanks to the sufficient information they provide, they give us access to the essentials of his work and creative life. The various fields of scientific study that he cultivated, beginning between 1940 (palaeontology and geology) and 1952 (astronomy), but also botany and even archaeology, were always combined with artistic knowledge, placing him in direct descent from the global spirit of Renaissance Man.
  

Lanhas' work makes us aware of realities that we can hardly apprehend with our senses. In this text, we will try to demonstrate that his work exists (and wants to be understood) in humanly unmeasurable dimensions of Space and Time - as if the realities that Lanhas created (paintings, drawings, words, ...), and the realities for which they were created, were not measurable. ), and the realities he has looked at and worked on most enthusiastically (stars and planets, rocks and fossils), exist simultaneously, have always been where they are and will continue to be there after the exhibitions are over, after the books are closed, after the words have changed their meaning, after those who have spoken about it all, those who have seen it all, have disappeared, after the stars have moved away modelling new universes... In short, everything in Lanhas' conceptual and creative process challenges the short time and scarce space we are forced to live in and confronts us with successive Infinities.
  

When we get to know the work and life of Lanhas (whom his friend, critic and biographer Fernando Guedes symbolically called ‘Seven Faces’) in depth, we will realise that it was his insatiable desire to know the world that led him down these seven (or more) paths. The man we are interested in revealed himself entirely in his practice as a plastic artist; but the truth is that he was only a man of the Arts (and of Letters, as his poems and the narratives of his dreams are of decisive complementary interest) to the extent that he also understood himself as a man of Science. And it was to the extent that he crossed the experimental and objective methodology of science with the subjective experimentalism of art that we also find him as a man of faith. Lanhas accepted, in parallel, scientific rationality and the dimension of the inexplicable, of a knowledge that is neither subject to proof nor to the practice of experience, a truth situated above human laws, and he was willing to use art as a testing ground for this reality and this mystery.
  

Being an architect was not, for Lanhas, a profession that provided him with the stability of a status or guaranteed a captive place in society; it was an inner vocation that extended beyond the specific work of building houses or public buildings. He was an architect because he felt that engineering lacked the dimension of understanding beauty that would transform him from a mere designer of habitable spaces into a thinker about the Universe we inhabit. And he was an architect because visual artists lacked the dimension of understanding the Useful and the Good that could transform a mere decorator of spaces into a discoverer of the materials, lines and colours, shapes and spaces that are hidden under the appearance of the ephemeral and the mere sensory experience.
  

In the early 1940s, Fernando Lanhas was an architecture student in Porto and the school (under the direction of Carlos Ramos) was experiencing moments of high quality teaching and creative freedom. Art students and architecture students lived together intensely and what resulted from this conviviality guaranteed the country decades of good construction, good urbanism and good art. Lanhas was one of the most active promoters of this youthful energy, organising the various editions of the Exposições Independentes (with extensions to Lisbon and Coimbra) where, without the aesthetic barriers of other initiatives, moderns (as defined by the SPN/SNI), neo-realists and surrealists coexisted for some time and where abstracts were revealed.
  

It is precisely as a geo-metric abstract artist that we should understand the decisive contribution that Lanhas made to the development of Portuguese art in the 1940s and onwards. His first paintings were figurative, very expressive both in their material reality and in their formal exasperation (sometimes made up of sharp angles or continuous curved lines intersecting on the plane to form schematic figures) and in their subject matter (faces tortured by old age, for example); but they were already very refined works in terms of shapes, colours (often shades of the same colour) and with the perspective almost absent - they were very graphic paintings. The poetic background that determined and managed these works was evidently symbolist and expressionist, not in the radical dimension of North European ex-impressionism, but in the continuity of a post-romantic sensibility that, in the cultural context (literary and artistic in the north of Portugal) was rooted in António Carneiro and Teixeira de Pascoaes.
  

With no specific theoretical knowledge and little iconographic knowledge of the world's first abstraction (from the 1920s-30s) or zero knowledge of contemporary abstraction, it was by intuition that Lanhas (also practically isolated internally) made his move. Portuguese society's special situation of neutrality and peace, albeit in a culturally peripheral, uninformed and repressive context, allowed him to advance along the path of Abstraction before the post-war international situation had really opened up Europe to the resurgence of this current. Although it didn't serve as an aesthetic, ethical or political justification for the quality and success of his work, it is true that Abstraction had the ‘advantage’ over Neo-Realism or Surrealism in that it didn't refer to the realities of the outside world, thus facilitating the tolerance of the regime and the more conservative critics towards the works of this current - some of the best pages on his work come from critics in this area, such as Fernando Guedes or Selles Paes de Villas-Boas.
  

His first abstract paintings began as simplifications of forms from the outside world. The year 1943 to 1944 was, in Lanhas' work, a time of decisive transition, when he carried out his first truly abstract experiments based on small notes fixed in the margins of the programmes of some musical auditions. This process resulted in a larger work, O2-44 (oil number 2 from 1944). The painting was significantly titled ‘The Violin’, before the author had found an objective designation formula for his works (indicating the technique with a letter, the order number and the date of realisation).
  

Nadir Afonso, another Portuguese pioneer of abstraction, who travelled to Paris in the 1950s, would soon relate to the international abstract currents in his practices and theorisations (such as those disseminated by the enlarged Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and the Denise Renée Gallery); but Lanhas, following a line that avoided Max Bill's concretism in the same way that he avoided Vasarely's Op dynamism, preferred to explore lines of metaphysical interpretation.
  

His paintings developed from abstract models, determined by the ever-increasing range of information he gathered in his scientific studies. In his varied plastic work, Lanhas can move us from the macro (telescopic) image to a micro (microscopic) image; he swings us between the metaphorical weight of the painted stones and the lightness of a drawing where a child can lift the world in his hands, like someone throwing a ball; He takes us from grey colours (where he even mixes rock dust) to sky blues and violets or from sidereal blacks to the brown of fertile lands; he makes us move (in a process that is always reversible) between the dynamic circular and diagonal lines and the uniform fields of the background colours. Lanhas thus creates different planes and levels of spatiality, going beyond the limitations of the dominant two-dimensionality and opening up the interpretation of each work to different senses and visual realities.
  

With these elements Lanhas built a vocabulary of open signs where the circle or circumference, its fragments and segments, triangular areas or bundles of straight lines, are associated in games of instability and multiple balance. They are forms that can be infinitely associated and extended in space, simulating schematic records of landscapes, signs centred in space, constructing the fiction of complex graphic signs belonging to an unknown communication code, a secret writing that requires deciphering...
  

The basic composition of his works is made up of the usual segmentation of the square and the circle, the intersection of the resulting geometric shapes and the lines between them. However, the final image of the work presents itself as a fragment of a unity that we will have to try to reconstitute, as an enigma that we will have to solve. Obliterating the paths of his reasoning, obliterating the lines of construction of each work, as if the coordinates were removed from a map or parts of the reasoning were removed from the demonstration of a theorem, Lanhas wanted to express himself in riddles, like a prophet.
  

This whole process of understanding and interpreting the world we've been trying to describe forced Fernando Lanhas into an unequal confrontation with Time and its extension, its materials, forms and places. But the artist didn't give in or renounce his free will as a creator: his Stones always seemed to meet the shapes he inscribed on them and not the other way round; his paintings, by extending their conception and realisation time, sometimes by several decades (by returning to formal and colour solutions, associating distant dates in time), simulated extending time within Time; finally, his dreams revealed his attempt to control his own body within the Space-Time binomial.
  

With no clear external references and no internal antecedents (Amadeo's work, which in those years was very poorly known, could not in any case provide any clues of interest to him) Lanhas didn't create any disciples either - in this he coincides with the common individual careers of the great modern Portuguese artists, around whom it has always proved impossible to form ‘schools’, in a dizzying array of heteronyms incapable of creating aesthetically coherent and lasting movements.
  

What Lanhas can pass on to the future lies outside his creative sphere: for example, his ethical attitude and restless wonder at the passage of time, the way this led him from artistic creation to civic pedagogy (researching and publishing, designing museums and libraries...), the attempt to prolong the ephemerality of life and human works through an art conceived in harmony with the eternity of the natural elements that surround us.
  

The exhibition and the book that serves it reflect Lanhas' understanding of the flow of elements that we have listed. In his artistic work, there is a set of statements with a metaphysical dimension that he wished could accompany scientific laws. Lanhas' creative poetics exist in this balance between human Truth and Mystery.

  
  
João Pinharanda 
Malaucène, 3 de Agosto de 2024