Interview conducted by journalist Lurdes Feria in 2005

After completing his degree in Law, he walked the corridors of diplomacy. Later he entered the world of business administration that requires presence of mind and tactfulness. Finally he discovered the fascination of art. He attended a painting course in an art school, which in his own words was not of much use for his artistic training.

Manuel Carmo (Lisbon, 1958) has several lives of various sizes and colours. They are differently shaded experiences involving similar things and leading to the same destinations. He argues that the artist must do everything, try everything, as Leonardo da Vinci. His eclectic course included plastic arts and literature. His creative power transcends specialities and genres. Unambiguously, in art he goes straight to the point. His paintings are the result of many synthesis operations that follow a quasi-linear aesthetics. In his writings, he uses a more complex language to analyse the mysteries of the creative act, following an inner need. It is intrinsically a risky adventure. He does not feel like looking back to what he has already done but rather think about what he is going to do next. To escape the deadlock and move on.

How and when have you discovered your attraction for plastic arts? Did they strike you at once? Please tell us a little bit of your life story.

It happened around 1985/86, when I realized that the intellectual life also encompassed the hands, handling the materials, moulding a territory where nothing existed before. Creation cannot be separated from the manipulation of matter, from the introduction of our will in a physical world outside us. I don't know if it struck me or not. I think it was a learning process quietly developed throughout the years. Even before I devoted myself exclusively to painting, the creative process was already part of my life through a number of activities I was engaged with. Writing, painting, sculpting or filming for me it is exactly the same. The only difference is in the parameters of each activity but what I want to say and really say is the same thing.

In the creative process, let's start by the choice. Do you start from a cloudy idea that becomes more and more clearly defined through a number of successive choices or do you follow a guideline?

The answer to that question lies in time. Only as time goes by, inevitably shaping our activity, can we establish those rules. Assuming that it is possible to know where we start and where we are heading to, I can say that my creative process is very slow and that I execute my works very rapidly. I worry about present events and mainly about the way people see them. I have no cloudy ideas or guidelines expanding myself or limiting my work. I just think about what I feel like thinking, when and how I feel like thinking.

You opted for the accuracy of geometry that seems deprived of the vibration of affections.

I don't think it is a question of geometric accuracy. It has rather to do with the fact that I construct most of my works almost exclusively on the basis of lines and dots and arrange or compose them on the surface of the canvas, generally white. That geometry is apparent and even cathartic, and that is more associated with gesturalism than with geometry. As for affections, they are always present in my gestural geometry, so to say. Without them it is impossible to create. But we can make them vibrate in a pure way or in a way that tends to be pure and minimal, considering that the main secrets are in the detail and not in the whole.

There is nothing stronger than emotions both for good and for evil. Do you agree with this statement?

I use to say that, in art, risk is the only thing that matters. The rest is solved and we shouldn't waste time speculating about it. The notions of good and evil are part of a range of established values that true art has nothing to do with. For me, the notions of good and evil are valid only in the field of human behaviour and never in the creative art.

The philosopher Zigmunt Bauman stated in an interview that the present culture is based not on the power to learn but on the power to forget. If we do not quickly forget what we know to understand what is new in a more and more unpredictable world, we become redundant. The established culture does not see this. Do you agree?

As to the world being more and more unpredictable, I don't know what he means. Is it the information vertigo imposed on us by the development of a globalised society? Are we faced with an unknown phenomenon? I am not sure. The new is not very different from the old. It is our perception of it that changes and that can disturb us or stimulate us. I myself feel stimulated by it, but I don't devise deep conceptual discrepancies in the present development of emotions vis-à-vis the past. I see differences in means, in the way people act, communicate, but not in the contents. Redundancy is part of the creative process. I am sure that it is necessary to undergo the impure to reach the pure. I have never focused only on one creative act. Painting, sculpture, video are indifferent means I use to express myself. < Above all I am interested in what I have to say, without barriers separating the different means of expression. I say things as I want to say them, sometimes writing, others painting, others just thinking or talking.

Your work widens the sign dimension. Which aesthetic assumptions are you based upon?

Signs build their unity at the level of forms and not contents, creating a language than can be read or deciphered. My work focuses on signs, but just as a territory of expression and never as a place for discovery. My main interest is to re-alphabetize that relationship, by creating a number of symbols capable of misconstruing the classicism of that analysis. In my exhibitions it is possible to see the confrontation between the original and the duplicate, the original not always being the masterpiece. It is incumbent on who sees my works to say what I have not done and that is precisely the goal of the exhibition. Aesthetic assumptions are codes, whose value depends on how I use them. More lyrical than conceptual, they provide the means to define or simply to refer all that can be apprehended by looking at my work, insofar as it is possible to understand a reality that is not present. When I paint, my intention is to state a concept I want to explore and expand. I do it as minimally as possible, trying to find the core of the question, the magic ingredient that leads to the whole.

You use virtually only primary colours. The combination of colours results from the idea you have in mind or when you start painting the colour imposes by itself?

The colours I use reflect that trend to purify the creative thought and the creative act. Primary colours appeal to the essence, they do not permit many whims of decoration, they don't let us be caught by the trend to repeat. By using only or mainly primary colours, you impose on yourselves a respect for purity that makes your eyes focus on the essence of what you want to say. The rest lies behind, hidden. It is there, as are all the intermediary colours, but it cannot be seen because it is useless, it is not even necessary to understand the truth on which you are working.

Have you ever felt the appeal for drawing or for the power of images outside the universe of writing? The fact that you have a king of script, that writing that guides your work, does not limit your freedom of expression?

Writing is only one of the means of expression I use in my work. It is as restrictive as everything that surrounds me and as liberating as everything that accompanies me. I write as I paint and I paint as I write. I don't think very much about that. It comes as it comes: sometimes writing comes before painting; others I only discover what I want to write after painting. The most important is to be fully immersed in the creative invention of the detail, the minor ruler that measures the widest spaces. That motivates me. To analyse a posteriori why I have don't this or that way is boring, it does not interest me, it adds nothing to what I am doing.

Your relationship with art seems more mental than physical. Which are the obsessions that feed your work?

May be the desire not to repeat myself, to be always a step ahead of what I have already done, trying to find an aesthetic purity I achieve little by little. May be also the easiness with which things appear before me. How quickly I complete a work, how thoughts and discoveries are encompassed by the environment that surrounds me, the interaction automatically established with the means I am using to express what I want to express. When I materialize a thought in a written text or in a sculpture, the action allows me to achieve new thoughts that are immediately transformed in new physical and spatial concepts.

The vertical line gives an idea of an opening on the pictorial surface that immediately suggests Mondrian. Besides, appropriation is a common trend in the present artistic practices. How does neoplasticism suit your proposals?

We are all influenced. I am sure if Mondrian inspires me, in the way he restricted the pictorial elements to the straight line, the rectangle and to primary colours, blue, yellow and red, grey shades, black and white. Indeed those are the colours that prevail in my work and the line is clearly my primary means of expression. My approach to figurative painting in 2004, in the exhibition “Stings of Life”, was a transient incursion, without consequences. But, contrarily to Mondrian, I don't feel the need to denaturalize the line or to free my work of any figurative references. In my painting I try to reflect what lies behind the cause for those figurative references. By doing so, I create a redundant self-devouring nature, but a real one. Even so that reality continues to be built on vocables. I try not to repeat what is already known, by using a circumstantial alphabet that does not exist beyond that reality or the moment when it is used. That quasi-nihilism clearly detaches me from the neoplasticism that tried to deprive art of all accessory elements so as to reach the essence though an objective plastic language, hence a universal one. Precisely the contrary happens in my works either paintings or written texts: I always try to find the adequate language with the clear purpose of making it universal. My work is the triumph of the ephemeral with all the vigour that encompasses the whole in a small detail.

The present art is said to have lost its symbolic value, submerged as it is in excesses and contaminations. Is there any way out of this discursive voracity?

The discursive voracity does not mean anything it consists merely of creating for the sake of creating. As Deleuze undoubtedly shows, repetition can be one of the means of creating. But only if it is felt and not said. As to excesses I consider the primary ingredient of any incursion in the creative act. By introducing excess in truth, we deepen the truth, making it less understandable to reasoning but more acutely felt by emotions. From that moment on, we begin to know what we are doing instead of thinking about what we can do. This distinction is crucial for the work of art to be bigger than its creator. The symbolic value of art will never disappear; only symbols apparently change in the succession of approaches to the concepts established during a certain period. Every now and then something new emerges. That is all that matters.

Apropos the Angel Orensanz Foundation For the Arts, how does one adapt an exhibition to a space with such a strong architecture?

I like difficult spaces. This has a fabulous architecture, like the Water Museum in Lisbon where I made an exhibition on the 1755 earthquake. The spaces tend to annihilate any exhibition made there. At the Orensanz Foundation, I tried to benefit from the interior architecture, using two tunnels and two sculptures of watches in plexiglass, a material whose lightness contrasts with that magnificent altar. I didn't want the space to annihilate my work nor did I want my work to be so strong as to cloud the space. Manifest 24 was finished a year ago and was waiting for a space to be exhibited. How it would be exhibited depended obviously not only from the physical space but also from the cultural environment surrounding it in this case, New York. Here, everything surrounds the written word: the placement of the sculptures, of the text, the creation of two independent observation tunnels. The main motif is the text, with paintings, sculptures and video illustrating what is written.

Does anyone seeing the exhibition become aware of the major role played by the manifest? What do you intend to say that has never been said?

The manifest is about the creative act. There is a difference between a declaration and a manifest. Declaration is everything I have said throughout my creative life; manifest is what I say when I come to the conclusion that it is arguable or when I am absolutely sure of it. The manifest is supported by 24 paintings linked to the 24 hours of a day's life. The installation includes a video that projects the watch so that people may identify every hour with the position of that hour in either watch. In the paintings I use grey as background for white and not as an integral part thereof. I chose to use the canvas as if it where paper, I tore it as it happens with the hours as they pass. The manifest is the most visible element in full, since the other works can only be seen in parts. This is the insight I would like people to have of the creative act.

There is something radiant in this project, where it is possible to see an allegory of time that flows as sand through the fingers. White is associated with daytime…

Exactly. But after the white canvas is torn, it is discarded to a kind of darkness, where it lays waiting for us to rescue it. I make a collage of white and grey and recover the red from the frames that are definitely baroque. I enjoy the contrast between the depurated and the baroque. Our life spans between those two opposites, just like the figurative and the abstract. For all this, I find the attempt to separate waters an artificial attitude.

In your artistic course, is this exhibition a rupture or part of a continuity process?

Not with standing the ruptures in language and materials, there is a line of thought that remains unchanged. If I look back at some of my works from some years ago, I see that the space composition is the same. I started in 1985 with two full canvases and a very violent intervention. After a break of nearly ten years, I started painting, this time withlines and dots. I feel the painting is finished when it cannot stand one more line or dot.

You have made an exhibition at the Water Museum in Lisbon on the 1755 Earthquake, a catastrophe that caused ninety thousand deaths and led to a radical change of the city's physiognomy.

Yes, I have. That exhibition included a video installation, three sculptures, two 30-meters wide digital panels and 22 paintings. The subject was the virtue of renaissance. Instead of displaying death and destruction, I showed how the survivors rebuilt the city and their lives. This may happen in any historical period, not only to cities but also to individuals. When everything crashes around us, we can always revive if we resist adversity. I tried to create a hymn to reconstruction and not to destruction.

What do you think of visibility in a country like Portugal with a small market that operates in closed circuit?

In Portugal there are great authors working at a large scale. The fact that the market operates in closed circuit is inevitable in a small country where innovations collide. There are attempts to escape that circuit, sometimes obliterating the author. Some of them are successful. To tell the truth, I am not worried about that. Presently the art market cannot be seen as a market with frontiers, be it nationalities or any other kind of boundary. Whatever the country, artists' works reflect what they think and feel at a certain moment of their evolution. More of a pamphlet or less, with more appropriations or less, the work of art is not encompassed within strict limits. Obviously the size of the place where you work influences the communication about what you do. But globalisation brings about an amazing phenomenon: all of a sudden we feel all equal.