P é r i o d e V a c h e

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 18:22] all rights reserved

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The artist Otacílio Melgaço has two official curators in the virtual world. A curator (from Latin: ´curare´, meaning ´to take care´) is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or, as the present case: sound archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and, highlighting the context in force here, involved with the interpretation of personal (heritage) material. Both, Mr. Paz and Mr. Campbell, are, therefore, reviewers of the Melgacian works. To learn more about their missions, tasks, assignments and responsibilities by means of valuable informations regarding the compositional process, the performative rhizomes and other special features, just click the following link: otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/preamblebypsp
(O.M.Team; P r e l u d e)

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"Luxuriant, eccentric, flamboyant. Full of radicality, physicality, impertinence. Vindictive, impetuous, outrageous. Unconventional, dissonant, shrill. Distorted, picaresque, bizarre. Extremely coloric, savage, pick-me-up! Jazzy, electronic, futuristic ...: in other words, a new provocative Melgacian sonic petard." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"The ´Vache´ is a period of the pictorial production of René Magritte during which the Belgian painter represents in a deliberately rude style a series of grotesque characters in paintings destined for his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1948. Succeeding Impressionist paintings In the style of Auguste Renoir, these works are mostly in opposition to those that he painted before the Second World War, for which he´s known and which presented a clear, unbroken line as well as poetic motifs. The art critic interprets this period in the style close to Fauvism as a gesture of defiance surreal against the Parisian art scene that Magritte had to leave in 1930 and which had more or less sulted since then.

[We deserve a deepening. As explained in Matteson Art, as a joke concocted by Magritte and his friends, René painted a series of hilarious pictures to exert a bit of revenge upon the Paris art world. Magritte experimented with a brash Fauve-inspired style in late 1947 dubbed ´Vache´ (literally, ´Cow´), which he premiered at an exhibition at the Galerie du Faubourg in Paris the next year. David Sylvester suggested that even though some of his Vache paintings were dated 1947 they were intentionally dated wrong so that Magritte could pretend that all the vauche paintings were not done deliberately for the Paris show, instead they were just part of a phase he started before he knew about the show.

According to Bernard Marcadé: ´In French, the term vache is used for an excessively fat woman, or a soft, lazy person. An unpleasant person is described as a peau de vache (cow-skin); amour vache (cow-love) refers to a relationship more physical than emotional. It thus treads a line between vulgarity and coarseness, and that is what characterises this set of paintings and gouaches, representing a radical departure from the painter’s neutral, detached style which had finally been accepted by Parisian Surrealist orthodoxy. Overall, the striking thing about these works is their garish tones, their exuberant, grotesque and caricatured subjects, all executed rapidly and casually in the name of a freedom from aesthetic and moral injunctions and prescriptions.´

Louis Scutenaire came up with most of the titles and his wife, Irene Hamoir, contributed many of the ideas. Later on in the 1960s when cataloguing his own work, Magritte refered to the ´vache´ painting as his fauve style, a term he did not use in the 1940s and 1950 which he also called them, ´the paintings of the doomed period.´

Paris: May, 1948

´The exhibition was accompanied by a small catalogue with a preface by the poet Louis Scutenaire, bearing an evocative title (´9been putLes pieds dans le plat´ – Putting one’s foot in it) and written in a slangy style, which is clearly in line with Magritte’s intentions. Moreover, Scutenaire would admit as much some years later: ´The important thing was not to enchant the Parisians, but outrage them.´ The triviality of the works actually wrong-foots Surrealist good taste. Both text and images are placed on a deliberately rustic and provincial register. ´We’d been fed-up for a good long time, we had (been put), deep in our forests, in our green pastures.´ Traditionally, the Belgians are seen as coarse peasants by the French, including the intellectuals.´

´The tone is set. Scut’ and Mag’ (their signatures, indicating their friendship and complicity) have decided to turn this exhibition into a kind of explosive manifesto against the arrogance and pedantry of the sycophants of the ideology advocated by André Breton. ´The moment had come to strike a great blow,´ Scutenaire would explain in retrospect. The two associates laid it on the line, The works shown in Paris joyfully mix comedy, viciousness and coarseness of the most scatological kind. In this respect they continue the visual counterpart to the three tracts that Magritte published in 1946 along with Marcel Mariën (The Imbecile, The Pain in the Arse, The Sod), in which one could already read a supreme contempt for all kinds of convention. Pictorial Content is probably the painting in the series which best allegorises Magritte’s desire to attack the pictorial practices with which he himself had engaged up until that point. It is no longer resemblance that is brought to the fore here, but an excess of distortion and a stridency of colour.´

I'm sure his Belgian group had a laugh at the outrageous paintings he produced for the show. Using the broad strokes and colors of Van Gogh he churned out a series of unsual paintings, some outrageous. The show in May at the Galerie du Faubourg was a failure, the French were not pleased. At the suggestion of his wife, Georgette and his principal dealer in the United States, Alexander Iolas, Magritte decides to abandon his ´experiment´ and return to his realistic style of the 1930s.]

Well, by means of a challenging metamorphosis of visual universe into sonorous: an ´experiment´ splendidly retaken by iconoclastic O.M., almost seventy years later.

But what were the reasons that led the Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist to do this? I bring you some conjectures about it.

If Magritte, being ironic and rampant, had shown his displeasure with Breton's stiffness (and the pernostic Parisian world of the art of that time), we can imagine that the Melgacian message has the same spirit. But to whom? Certainly for part of the current niche of music (and culture) made in his city, state, country. Not for the same reasons but because of the banalization, ´slot machine´ populism, lobotomous mass productions. Even in the field of modern classical, cutting-edge jazz, intelligent electronic etc? With rare and praiseworthy exceptions, I believe that yes. In these scenarios (unfortunately, not only in Brazil), there´s a pastiche (under a charlatan supposed new attire) of what has been done previously in history (wombs for rent - of the past -) or falsely bold propositions but, in reality, an emptied aesthetics, innocuous childish, videlicet: cheap tricks and worn pyrotechnics. ´Période Vache´ is an explicit reaction to all this, in a direct and fulminating way. It´s totally consistent with the whole context, the cover image of the album being related to Lucia of Syracuse (283–304), also known as Saint Lucy or Saint Lucia (Latin: Sancta Lucia). Lucy's Latin name Lucia shares a root (luc-) with the Latin word for light, lux. This has played a large part of Saint Lucy being named as the patron saint of the blind and those with eye-trouble.

A relevant detail: Melgaço would not be naive to plastically imitate or even mention the holofotized period of René in terms of the graphic art of his EP. So what´s directed to our gaze and what´s directed at our hearing are both not conflicting but the contrast is purposeful. He, wisely, takes an antithetical view (of the Belgian painter's ´Vache´) on the cover of the disc precisely so that we´re struck by the ravishing resounding Flood without external, unnecessary, redundant interferences.

[It´s worth mentioning that the state in which Otacílio was born, Minas Gerais, is also known (not its metropolitan faction, obviously, but in the archetypal interior) for its cattle herds, milk production and other derivatives. Therefore, the term ´cow´ (´vache´) acquires a referential meaning. Be it in the positive situability, or in the thought-provoking sarcasm embedded in the specific approach present in the focused work.]

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´The pain passes, but the beauty remains.´ (Auguste Renoir)

´Fauvism was our ordeal by fire ... colours became charges of dynamite. They were expected to charge light ...´ (André Derain)

´From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.´ (Henri Matisse)

´Too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I intend to restore the familiar to the strange. Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.´ (René Magritte)

Painful, beautiful, incendiary, dynamythical, enlightening, colourful, familiarly strange, mysterious, Pandora's box ´Période Vache´.
O.M., the (never-fading) Wild Beast." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - Fauvism is the style of les Fauves (French for "the wild beasts"), a loose group of early twentieth-century modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain;

II - weimarart.blogspot.com.br/2011/05/magrittes-periode-vache.html

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
quotes have Wikipedia as a source...

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Between two parentheses...
(Atonalism, Twelve-Tone, Serialism, Musique Concrète... Acousmatic. Eletroacoustic. Magnetic Tape. Expressionism, New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, Mythic Method. Electronic...Computer Music, Spectral, Polystylism, Neoromanticism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism...are addressed by Melgaço. Paradoxically New Simplicity and New Complexity also.
Art Rock, Free Jazz, Ethnic Dialects, Street Sounds are occasional syntax elements.
All the possibilities mentioned above and others that were not mentioned are the usual accoutrements of the composer/instrumentalist to establish his ´babelic´ glossary. We can prove this in a short passage of a single composition up along the entirety of a conceptual phonograph album. All distributed over a career and idiosyncratic records. Have we a universe before us and I propose to see it through a telescope, not a microscope.
I propose not handle very specialized topics here. Otherwise would be, with the exception of musicians and scholars, all hostages of a hermetic jargon. Because more important is to present Otacílio Melgaço to the general public and not to a segment of specialists. Faction of experts not need presentations, depart for the enjoyment beforehand. For this reason there is no niche here for intellectual onanism and encrypted musical terminology. The reason for these parentheses is to establish such elucidation. The non-adoption of technicalities leads to more panoramic, amplifier reviews. Are You always welcome. Those who do not dominate contemporary music and are introduced to the world of ubiquitous O.M. [autodidact and independent artist who, being more specific, does not belong to schools or doctrines; artist who makes Music and that´s enough; music devoid of labels or stylistic, chronological, historical paradigms or trends] and Those who belong to the métier and turn to enjoy propositions they know and also delving into advanced Melgacian sound cosmogonies...
I conclude poetically. ´Certeza/Certainty´ by Octavio Paz. ´Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real La mano que escribe, ¿son reales
Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo Entre dos paréntesis.´ If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
We´re all more and more a-l-i-v-e now.)
- P.S.P.