Once you get past the easy to overcome threshold between the environment and Eduardo Cardozo's canvases, which given their hypnotic attitude and size inevitably swallow the viewer (even the most absent - minded one), carrying them into an enveloping and paradoxical calm magma, it is possible to find, in the works of the last few years, elements that are initially extra - pictorial (fragments of tiles, dinnerware, glass), and that are nonetheless never perceived as foreign from the representative or anti - representative plane of the work. To walk, consciously and conscientiously surrendering, between imagination and abstraction is something Cardozo accomplishes with Luciferian mastery. He skillfully erases the tensions that used to divide praxis and ideology some decades ago and that, thanks to the common occurrence, even at the same time, of both poles, dissipate in his paintings. This allows to casually include what at first glance a purist – a figure that is not at all odd in th e field of abstraction - could interpret as a contaminant element, that "small piece" of reality, the entity that emerges from mere chromatic play.
Eduardo Cardozo
Artistas
The painter's conceptual system is marked by terms – and relative, "concrete", and desired impasses – such as "doubt", "uncertainty", and "mistake", which are already a part of the way he works, of the continuous experimentation with an insidious and stubbornly encouraged fate, of the extremely tight relationship between life experience and its translation into oil painting. Yet it is not about impetuses that are more or less expressionist, romantic aromas, unstoppable but contained fury or psychological convulsions carried into the pigment, but about the tireless use of a brush that drags the self of the doer and drafts his (informal) report, wisely tending to the input of both his concerns and his cultural filters, thereby avoiding mere autobiography. Here is where the true peak of Cardozian painting can be perceived, the (seemingly unbalanced) balance between the traces of a sort of seismograph of his human condition and the knowledge of history, and especially of the history of painting, that allows him to restrain excess, imperatively erasing any naïveté but giving the pathos freedom to take off.
Cardozo's palette has changed gradually throughout the years (due to both the coherence and self - awareness we’ve just mentioned), going, without choc, from earthy to blueish pre - eminences, always prioritizing a persisting presence of nature – earth, air, water – as a primal stimulus. Now, in his aero - aquatic phase (it is hard to miss even Leonardian concerns in his cerulean velature), with this new series, he turns it up a notch regarding the material matter mentioned at the beginning. However, it is no longer about adding something to the canvas, but about the gesture, somewhat self - referential, of sculpting, of "working" – almost (hesitantly) tracing the etymology of the word, that tripalum , an instrument of torture – the canvas itself, distorting it, deforming it and, once ready painting it. What had long ago collapsed, ideally and happily, in many of Cardozo's images – that is, the certainty of a structure that endures its chromatic journeys –, here turns into raw reality. It angrily translates into mistreated, lacerated, bruised and confusing canvases.
On the large pieces, Cardozo handles huge burlaps that he frays, one string at a time, irreversibly modifying the weave of the threads, allowing brutal holes, irreparable injuries, and unusual cracks to spring up (almost as i f he wanted to state that there is no weave 2 without trauma). On them, he masterfully intersperses less serious damage, light traces of disruption, meager disturbance, and even miniscule uncorrupted areas, creating an amazing renovation of the "entramado", which means both plot – a narrative of that which cannot be narrated (the abstract) – and texture - the skin of the painting, baring its most intimate abrasions. The surface of each piece thus becomes a rough terrain where the fibers that make it up are cons tantly on the edge of total collapse, in a precocious state of dissolution, a state that, while it shows its distress, it also reorganizes its shapes, causes intrigue with its new paths, amazes with its irregularities. In his youth, the artist studied with the renowned Uruguayan tapestry artist Ernesto Aroztegui, and now works in reverse, distorting what he had learned to do, in an arduous task of what one could call "unraveling".
The metaphor of the wounded canvas – both in the enormous pieces that are se veral feet long (which might refer to the entire social corpus) and the fragments/smaller paintings (individuals), both equally vulnerable – is not, therefore, just a sign of desolation, failure or crisis, but also a chance to re - think the practice of paint ing, expanding it, without coloring outside the lines.
