In search of lost rhythm
It is harder than ever to understand how the problem that is peculiar to our era consists in the absence of rhythm when we are surrounded by endless agitation everywhere, which seems to be looking for the meaning of things. However, we can see that abandoning cosmic, biologic, social, and psychological rhythm will bring about destruction in human life of which we are not quite aware. Daily routines and mechanically repeating gestures, particularly in the city, will slow man down as a creative being. How can we find, once again, the pleasant, beautiful, and true rhythm that will synchronise the steps we take in our lives with those in the Universal Life?
The aesthetic suggestion in Bruno Castro Santos’ drawings and patterns seems to be the result of a combination between architecture and design. However, he takes care in breaking up those designed patterns as to disturb repetitions and maybe introduce the mystery of an entirely unique individuality that will vibrate in a merely different outline. That is when they say that the ‘drawing is solved’.
From a rhythmanalytical point of view, Bruno Castro Santos’ case as an artist - which he confided in us - is now between the ‘effort to achieve a strong intuition’ and ‘a certain dormant state of this time, which does not function with the arts’. Bruno also states that: ‘Wild intuition is extinct’. Therefore, Castro Santos’ fight and work seems to revolve around these two clusters - the effort to achieve intuition and the dormant state of time. The title for this project was initially palimpsest. Indeed, although this performance seems to be post-historic and post-Minimalism, his drawings seem like they are still dreaming about the lost rhythm.
– But what rhythm would that be? He says it himself: that of universal life covered by wild intuition. The word ‘wild’ should be thought of in a liberating sense, as if we were moving away from the city’s monotone repetitions and cacophonies in order to bury ourselves within a magic forest of synaesthesia crossed by rhythms capable of generating that same intuition aspired by artists and free integration with what is Real. Since there is no single individuality in the great Universe - or in a grain of sand, or a wave in the ocean, or in a tree leaf - that is bound to repeat itself. And this is the renovating sense of rhythm. Waves wash over the sand, just like a line crosses space. They are similar to each other, but they will not repeat themselves.
One time, as we were climbing the irregular stairs of his Lisbon studio, he noted that the varied stone structures (traditional houses, churches, etc.) will better allow for the frequency of the earthquake waves to go through due to that same irregularity or rhythmic variety, while industrial structures with repeated patterns that do not vary will be rapidly destroyed. It would certainly be a quest to paint the force of this rhythmic variety.
Bruno Castro Santos’ curvilinear and straight-line bases, with approximate symmetries or arabesque-like suggestions, wavy schemes here, some elegant rhythmic tensions there, will remotely suggest the promise of a rhythm to be found again. As only this rhythm - by maybe saving us from a deadly routine - will be truly functional with the arts.
Rodrigo Sobral Cunha
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