Manezinho

                      My ‘surrealistic’ work has its roots in a solipsistic existential crisis I lived through at the age of fourteen around 1970. The labels ‘surreal’ and ‘dream’ only partly cover the experience because they are too weak to capture the sentiments of derealization and depersonalization that go with the psychotic condition in which the world is reduced to pure experience and both the notion of a self (depersonalization) and a world separate from the self (derealization) are dissolved. I survived and it turned out to be a great source of artistic inspiration when I developed the doctrine of “Complete equal rights for every possible image”. Later I discovered that other artists have gone through a similar crisis, notably the writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) with his universe of exploded identities and the solipsistic artistic world of the Dutch philosopher-poet Johan Andreas dèr Mouw (1863-1919), whose estate I was allowed to organize as a young philosopher under the guidance of my great mentor and later friend Marcel Fresco (1925-2011). These experiences have been a lifelong source of inspiration.\r\nIn this context I developed the technique of Pareidolic or Emergent Painting. In my studio I first create a rich aleatoric texture of blobs of paint and brushstrokes on a selection of canvasses and panels. I call these structures “semantic spaces”. They are little universes inviting to be filled with meaning. Some of these panels can remain unused in my studio for years. Others stimulate my imagination and I slowly start to ‘interpret’ them by strengthening some associations and removing others. There is a relation with seeing images in aleatoric structures like clouds. The phenomenon is called “pareidolia”. The artistic process is illustrated in Figure 1). \r\nI see no fundamental difference between my work as an artist, philosopher, or scientist. My view on art is thoroughly anti-Platonic. It is a form of praxis, rather than poiesis. The essence of creativity is uncertainty. If you know what you want to make beforehand, there is no creation. \r\nA fundamental notion for me is the concept of what I call, ‘facticity’, which I borrowed from Heidegger although my version of the concept is different in many aspects. It stands for the fact that our world is ‘given’ before it is ‘understood’. An insight that is also reflected in the slogan “L’existence précède l’essence”, from Sartre.  \r\nAs a philosopher I formulated a technical definition of facticity as: “the amount of meaningful information in an object”. I have developed this concept in several publications in the past two decades: a work of art with high facticity exists on the sweet spot between order and chaos, which is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.  \r\nIn principle there are two ways to create works with high facticity: either you start with low entropy, and you introduce randomness via aleatoric processes, or you begin with high entropy and start to organize. The practices of emergent or pareidolic painting fall in the latter category. In this perspective creativity is defined as: goal-oriented exploration of randomness.\r\nThe latter strategy, interestingly, is adopted by the current AI techniques like stable diffusion: they start with a randomly generated dataset with maximal entropy, and from this data set gradually reconstruct new meaningful images or texts based on concepts learned from the digitally stored collective memory of our civilization. However, AI-generated artworks have low conditional facticity. In artistic value their contribution to the history of art never exceeds the amount of information that is given in the command line prompt that was used to generate them. \r\nThere is a connection with the long history of the use of psychotic or entheogenic substances by artists to distort and enrich their perception of the world and with the surrealistic technique of ‘écriture automatique’.\r\nAll these formal issues, however, are of minor importance in comparison to the realm of meaning, emotions and values that unveiled when human artists deploy such aleatoric techniques.                      

                      O meu trabalho “surrealista” tem as suas raízes numa crise existencial solipsista que vivi aos catorze anos, por volta da decada de 70. Os rótulos “surreal” e “sonho” cobrem, apenas, parcialmente a experiência porque são demasiado fracos para captar os sentimentos de desrealização e despersonalização que acompanha a condição psicótica em que o mundo é reduzido à pura experiência. Tanto a noção de um self (despersonalização) quanto a de um mundo separado do self (desrealização) são dissolvidas. Eu sobrevivi e acabou sendo uma grande fonte de inspiração artística quando desenvolvi a doutrina de “Direitos iguais para todas as imagens possíveis”. Mais tarde descobri que outros artistas passaram por crises semelhantes, nomeadamente o escritor Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) com o seu universo de identidades explodidas e o mundo artístico solipsista do poeta-filósofo holandês Johan Andreas dèr Mouw (1863-1919), cujo espólio fui autorizado a or