Some people still think drawing is just a preparatory stage for something else. Worse even: there are those who think drawing means line. Does it get any worse? It does indeed. There are also people for whom artworks may be classified by their 'support': paper, fabric, metal, marble and so forth, thus transferring technical standards from museology to the appreciation of art, or what is called 'aesthetic fruition'. As we all know, there is no shortage of stupidity in the world, so why not in art too?

In Antonio Dias' oeuvre, starting from 1976, paper has had nothing to do with support. Ever since his trip to Nepal, when in close contact with an artisan community he decided to make his own ... paper, it became obvious that Dias was not about 'fabricating' yet another support. After all, high quality papers were not lacking in Europe, where he lived at the time. His quest had to do with an existential makeover that went together with a turning point in his expressive medium.

I do not at all mean to detract from the magnificent drawings that made me aware of the greatness of his art, which I first viewed at Jean Bogichi's Relevo gallery on Avenida Nossa Senhora de Copacabana. The drawings I saw in the 1960s were splendid, and I envied my friend José Sanz for having two of them in his living room. Then I came across the formidable works of the Opinião 65 exhibition that went way beyond those drawings. The point of this anecdote is to underline the importance that the so-called works 'on paper' by Antonio Dias took on, after 1976 and they could hardly be classified as drawings, or merely works on paper.

Paper here is a planar environment on which the artist will intervene. But it is not just any environment; it bears no relation to a white cube or raw canvas, a public square or building facade. The artist made it, himself. He chose its color and texture. Not only that, he learned from the artisans, set his own limits, chose his tacks. Like on a boat, each work is a vessel that gets its own destiny and crew.

Dias seldom chooses a readymade paper, but even then he does not keep to the rules or conventions. Once again, we are asked to think about the notion of field. For high-powered poetic expression, contemporary art cannot do without this concept imported from physics. One could be thinking of various fields such as the gravitational field, for example; some works fall, others rise. But the idea of the electromagnetic field, a flexible field that varies according to the load with which it is charged, is surely the one mostly seen in these environments on paper.

Once you start looking at things this way, of course, the works begin to take on a different dynamic. There is an entirely new use of watercolor on these 'fabricated' environments. A charming aspect of watercolor has always been the artist's loss of control over the medium as the specific force of the technique makes itself felt. Antonio reins in his constructivist rigor and does all he can to hold out against what watercolor is forcing him to do. Technique and poetics obviously go together here, they are the same thing. The field and its lines of force are givens. Paint takes over the outlines of any figures applied on it. The environment absorbs them and eventually determines boundaries for paint and figure. However, let us not forget that the environment was devised by the artist. It is not a support; it is absolutely not a work on paper. Paper here is not a supporting actor, it plays the leading role, it deserves an Oscar, a Golden Palm, or a Silver Bear.

In this show-business world in which art is immersed, we forget that these works, due to their scale, may be thought of as fragments of skin, tattoos on imaginary bodies, pieces of ourselves projected in dreams in which we are experiencing joy, or yet nightmares in which we are hard done by. Times of happiness and sadness, sometimes together, sometimes separately. This production of disseminating meaning is wholly bound up with the field of force in which the question of sexuality is raised. It is not about sensuality, which would cushion and prettify the meaning of work.

It is obviously on a higher level, denser, clear, and straightforward. There are none of the vulgar signs of the post-pop world. We are again dealing with sensations. And these sensations can have no subject matter other than a Freudian politics. The fate of these paper vessels is an open question. Every image, every figure, every texture, every field, asks: where is the libido headed? Yours, mine, ours. The libidinal economy that went missing throughout a whole period of Dias' oeuvre, at least from 1968 through 1976, finds its way back into the works done on his Nepalese paper.

Heidegger said that we think we know what technique is when we repeatedly use the instrumental view of technique, or technology. 'We will, as we say, 'get' technology 'spiritually in hand.' We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control. In 1953, Heidegger was concerned with how humanity saw modern technology making use of the instrumental reasoning involved in everything: from large dams to jet planes at the time, or from nanotechnology to gigantic particle accelerators in the present day. But the artist here is not using the kind of modern technique that exploits nature. He is working with that technique whose essence Heidegger was also to find in Goethe's Elective Affinities. In a work of art, the romance between Eduard, Charlotte and Ottilie, the philosopher found the word transforming the concept of 'perdure' (fortwähren), previously 'forever', into 'continue granting', or 'bestow permanently' (fortgewähren). Heidegger goes on: 'And if we now ponder more carefully than we did before what it is that actually endures and perhaps alone endures, we may venture to say: Only what is granted endures. That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants.' Clearly, this 'primally out of the earliest beginning' is purely Heidegger's contribution to Goethe's construction of the word as 'continue granting' or 'continue bestowing' instead of 'perdure.' Heidegger presses on with his vision and way of thinking and tells us: 'That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants'. Now we are approaching what would be the essence of a technique that is quite unlike the contemporary one of which naive engineers believe themselves to be masters. Three verbs are active in the essence of this aspect of technique: perdure, grant and bestow. Thus the essence of a thing could be that which perdures because grants and bestows. It has nothing to do with those 'universal' and 'generic' senses in which all subspecies would fit. For Heidegger, then, it has nothing to do with the 'scholastic' sense of essence. Far from the modern technique, watercolors on handcrafted paper these works are that which perdures, grants and bestows; their essence remains somewhat lost in the contemporary world that, in the Era of Technique, would do anything but grant or bestow. Much less analyze the essence of anything.

Watercolors and collages on paper grant and bestow an economy of the libido and open their fate to be examined poetically. These fragments of reverie have their poetry made to perdure in that greater sense: vessels whose destiny is to ask and ponder possible answers.

Rio de Janeiro, February 2013.

Translated by Izabel Murat Burbridge