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Essays | |||||||||||
| Intensity, violent passion, desire and frustration quiver through the surfaces of Nogueira’s paintings.
Fragmented layers of subtly modulated color create depth of space, while in contrast, the freely accelerating
lines resist the color-depth by flattening the picture plane. From the tension of this push and pull between
color and line, a narrative of energy emerges and surrounds the viewer. The staccato and furious brush strokes
only heighten the kinetic and emotional tension. Nogueira’s canvasses explore the relationship between painting and music -- what is seen and what is heard -- felt viscerally through lyrical rhythms of repetition and variation. His repetition and variation of line modulates the surface with undulating pulses, drawing the viewer into the dance. The freedom of movement in Nogueira’s painting commands and masters an expression of dance that is in other ways limited for him in as much as he is wheelchair-bound. So also it functions for any viewer in response to each of our own disabilities. The painting paints itself; with a partnered fado between the hand and the acrylic, the eye and the canvass, the artist and the work in a reciprocal embrace as one. Nogueira simply listens closely enough to its demands to realize where next to touch the brush to the surface. Nogueira’s earlier work flows through kinesthetic experiences of female bodies, stirring desire by withholding sexual satisfaction. The intensity and boldness of the female forms reflect this human misadventure, rife with deep melancholy and anger. The paintings objectify both the women’s forms and the body of the viewer standing before them, in a mutual exchange of flesh-songs fraught with frustration. These older paintings explore sensual tension as a type of autobiography regarding his physical disability and, ultimately, the universal frustration of masculinity. Painting, here, becomes a sensual experience with imaginative lovers perpetually frozen in space, more fulfilling than any single moment of physical ecstasy. Nogueira’s recent work has undergone a sea change moving from the sexual to the political, which insists upon the individual human voice within a global perspective. His new work explodes into issues of global environment and politics, mating disappointment with a will to acceptance, both attentive and disappointed. His new acrylic painting, Oil on Canvass, takes fuel oil as its subject matter, not its medium as in oil paints, and functions as a snapshot of what Nogueira finds in the world around him and within him: the waste and heedless consumption, the inability to communicate, and the fiction of happiness that embodies destruction and manifests abuse. Color only gets in the way of this story. Nogueira disrobes the canvass of color variation in order to emphasize variation of pure line, simplifying the visual vocabulary toward a more direct and intense experience. He strips down the color to let the line itself create form, space, and ultimately subject matter. But the subject matter here reveals a vision of falsehoods, uncertainty, defective humanity, unborn children, fish that cry, knives that can’t cut, blue flowers, hands that reach and stretch. Canvasses, Nogueira feels, have many functions, and we can only depend upon the lines to tell the truth or not. It is up to the lines to lie, if they will. Paintings collide, through principles of design, to allow Nogueira to speak what he feels. His visual language better enables his expression, and this new composition is one of disappointment with and hope for individual people, humanity at large, and, ultimately, himself. Jacquelyn Tuerk, PhD Assistant Professor of Art History Kean University 2005 | |||||||||||
| Rather than bolster a self-conscious cleverness, Nogueira’s work is charged with undiluted
passion and purpose. His paint and passion live unmixed with baser matter in its genuine intent. Alfred Olivi Professor of Humanities Essex County College 2004 | |||||||||||
