Theodore Ereira-Guyer
The Second Heart

Now spring brings back unchilled warmth,
now the rage of the ecquinoctial sky
grows silent with the pleasant breezes of the west wind.
The Phrygian fields should be quitted, Catullus,
& the fertile territory of sweltering Iznik:
let us fly to the bright cities of Asia.
Now the mind trembling in anticipation yearns to roam,
now the happy feet grow strong in their pastime.
Be well, o sweet company of friends,
who having wandered far from home together
return in different ways to a route headed in a different direction.
– Catullus, ‘Carmen 46’

Theodore Ereira-Guyer has a remarkable capacity to coalesce the particular and the timeless. His etchings in plaster might look excavated from geological epochs alien to our own, and yet whether codified by the genre of landscape, still life, or portrait, each bristle with the unmistakable touch of the original and the singular by an artist working today, in our own time, and with the forward march of mark-making in his eyes. Part of this is due to the fascinating complexity of Ereira-Guyer’s compositional process, which feels more partial to the experiments of the alchemist as much as the designs of the painter (and which I outline in detail later). But it is also in the recognition that he is depicting a world that only he knows; as that world changes shape in his memory, perhaps it has even been lost to him. Without ever wholly abandoning representational fidelity to his subject matter, Ereira-Guyer grounds his luminous and almost disinterred landscape studies in figuration, and yet these works come very close to an abstract rendering of site and place with their painstakingly executed attention to the effects of light.

Working between his studios in Deptford and just outside of Lisbon in southern Portugal, on the north- eastern back roads to Santarem, Ereira-Guyer restlessly creates like a master craftsman. Not unlike Anselm Kiefer, the genius scavenger, as he trawls his Barjac laboratory of boiling temperatures and provisional architectures, Ereira- Guyer is idiosyncratic in his approach to making. The whole world of things, whether fossilized or breathing, ancient or modern, is his studio in which to act. Ereira-Guyer does not paint pictures on easels; he does not, or does not only, fire up the kiln in the foundry. These are works produced by a total approach to making. When I left his south-east London studio, fresh into early spring rain, I was struck by the originality of his process, by the way these pictures are propelled by an uncompromising sense of experimentation that feels rare, today, unique even, at a time when so much that is produced is underwritten by the confidence of the market and not by the unforeseeable possibilities of artistic invention.

Take Ereira-Guyer’s practice of making the landscapes in the present exhibition. First, using varnish and acid, the artist paints an image of his subject, his site, whether a Portuguese valley or Brazilian forest (and where he spends some weeks each year), and whether principally organized by the given coordinates of tree, field, horizon, dune, or crater. In this instance, his material is not canvas or clay but mild steel and the chemical reaction eviscerates the surface like the way hydrogen ionic rain might mark and mould pine. This is not a case of one artistic material marking an object, but the wild unpredictability of two elemental forces marking each other, as though locked in a tempestuous seduction or duel, before both submits to the strength of the other. Second, Ereira-Guyer covers the plate in etching ink, not dissimilar in concept to conventionally printing onto paper using a press, before pouring a thick layer of wet plaster over the image. It is not by coincidence that Ereira-Guyer’s works resemble prints, or more specifically the residual marks of the most ancient prints, those of the irrepressible mark-maker in the cave whose outstretched palm touched an arid boulder for the first time but whose trace remains in perpetuity. Third, Ereira-Guyer pushes a canvas stretcher with fibre glass quadraxil fabric—firmly, deeply—into the plaster, which he then uses—softly, delicately—to build up thin layers of plaster to guarantee the strength of the overall composition. As the plaster sets and dries, the plaster absorbs all the ink, paint, and pigment on the steel plate, as well as all the subtle contours of the metal. The only comparative mode of creation, to my mind at least, is the bas-relief. In such a form, the projection from the surrounding surface is slight and no part of the modelled form is undercut. At the end of the artist’s process, the result of the work is figured like the cast of the etching plate or, to put it another way, a topographical rendering of a place rather than a flat representation of that place. These are works that manage to embody the very form of their subject, with its layers of life and its textures of time, as well as content—the look—of the place that they represent.

It is true that there are precedents to the tonal success of Ereira-Guyer’s surfaces. In some ways, his work resembles the dreamy drawings of forests in the work of fellow Lusophone Lucas Arruda, whose subliminal landscapes, or those in his ‘Deserto-Modelo’ series, manage to compress wide spaces into small canvases in a way that, the closer you get to them, the further you are from accessing them. Ereira-Guyer’s forests offer this quality too. They are real and mysterious at the same moment. In other respects, Ereira-Guyer creates like the Scottish painter Andrew Cranston, and especially those works, such as House of the Famous Poet (2020-21), that are painted onto hardbound books. Ereira-Guyer takes his source material from a plethora of origins: the old book, newly bought from the charity shop, holds an excitement for him as it does for Cranston, as we will see in the case of the ‘plaster faces.’ But it is also an intensely material starting point: to begin with the page as the origin stage, the first line of creation to be built up like scaffolding before being abandoned completely once the house is built.

The ‘plaster face’ portraits are, in the strictest sense, not portraits but sculptures. They represent people—pharaohs, emperors, the commoner— but are drawn from busts and masks, which was a way to approach the subject of the human face without having to paint specific people alive today. His source material comes from dog-eared old library books and second-hand hardback anthologies of the art of Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria. Like the landscapes, this approach to portraiture enables Ereira-Guyer to focus on the fundamental principles of art historical genre without attaching significance to the particularity of a friend, or lover, or stranger, alive today. These references enable Ereira-Guyer to, in his own words, ‘go back in time to select the images… to create a different sense of distance, to create more space for myself to project… and imagine or work with just the face without the same qualities of personhood.’ One of those plaster faces is sourced from a reproduction of Julius Caesar in an old book on the history of Roman statuary. With ovoid eyes, pressed sharp at the edges, and lips pursed in a manner that suggests both an irrepressible ego and a sense of hesitancy before commanding the force of men, Untitled VI (Studies for Crying Fountains) (2024) replicates something of the general and statesman whose allegiance to the Roman Republic faltered in pursuit of military glory. The glistening effect on the surface resembles a worn-down coin and Caesar, lest we forget, was the first to put his face on currency. It feels somewhat redundant, though, to see Caesar in this representation of him. It is more an experiment in what can be changed, revised, destroyed and reformed in the artistic treatment of the human face and yet retain something of its original source. ‘In the end’, as Caesar said, in a perhaps apocryphal phrase, ‘it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.’

Untitled II and V (Studies for Crying Fountains) (both 2024) are altogether different kinds of portrait; in degree, if not in kind. They are scarcely portraits at all. However, for this writer at least, there is something more profound in their aspect, something which contains, despite or even because of their reluctance to resemble their subject, a truer sense of personhood. Or, to put it another way, an acknowledgment that resemblance is, against all our expectations, not the most profound criteria for what we seek in the genre of portraiture. Instead, what we seek is a sense of the subject’s disposition and temperament, which may be in retreat from us. We long to know who this person is not, or not merely, the characteristics that coalesce to make up their accumulation of qualities. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to truly know who someone is; for others, we know from the first.

It is the same sense of abstracted portraiture that animates Frank Auerbach’s studies of Stella West, or E.O.W., from the early 1950s until 1963, in which the paint is built up and commands an almost sculptural quality. Auerbach’s technique of repeated overpainting of previous images on the same board, an extreme example of his endeavour to convey a sense of his accumulated experience of the model, finds an analogy in Ereira-Guyer’s plaster faces. But if the effect of Auerbach’s portrait is to amass information, Ereira-Guyer subtracts as he pares back the subject matter—a face, or a sculpture of a face, or a reproduction of a sculpture of a face—to its barest essentials. It is barely a portrait at all. In these plaster faces, then, the artist’s rigorous process of building up, layering, scaling back, and layering once again offers up a comparative experience to Auerbach’s E.O.W. for the viewer to delight in its texture: we see the faces across time, and not as one snapshot in time, which elicits a mystery comparable only to examining a ruin in which we track various historic interventions simultaneously. In this respect, Ereira-Guyer is as much an excavator in the field as an artist with a palette knife; a maker and searcher for the meanings held hidden, part revealed, in palimpsests and time- worn stone.

In the present exhibition, Ereira-Guyer displays a number of etchings, hung upon and within blue, silver, and pink silk. Like heraldic banners or medieval tapestries, or like a kind of avant-garde cinema in which the materiality of the frame is part of the overall visual presentation of the work, these silk etchings captivate with the same iridescent timelessness of the best stories. It is hard to talk about their material complexity without first addressing their beauty and philosophical ambitions.

In The Inconsistency of Passing Time (2024), we encounter the tangible world of the present— specifically, a Portuguese forest landscape— depicted using shellac inks, which offers up the effect of a time-worn world of the ancient past. This is not a deceptive representation of the present made to seem and appear ancient, like printer paper soaked in tea to resemble parchment, but rather the present—a forest, for the artist, freighted with personal meaning—represented with highly experimental techniques that, in their complex alchemy and burning like embers, appear as old as time. It might be surprising, but this is the definition of advanced art. To make work that, on the surface, could have been made two thousand years ago and yet, by the very nature of its unprecedented process, could only have been made this way is a remarkable achievement. The title itself reminds me of the account of non-linear time put forward by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, when he declared that the ‘idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.’ I cannot help but see all of Ereira-Guyer’s works in this way. In their radical representation of the present, they might resemble what we recognize to be the past, but are uncompromisingly pregnant with an infinity of possibilities.

Exhibition catalogue essay by Matthew Holman