It is not easy to be radically incoherent, neither in language nor in painting. The Situationists achieved this in their anti-artistic intent, walking in a dérive and empowering the figure of the flâneur, that figure wandering aimlessly in the midst of the accelerated context of modernity. Incoherent is the confused, the discordant, the incomprehensible, that which escapes logic; in short, the proposal of something alternative, often in contradiction to the usual ways of inhabiting. Incoherence is in many cases based on the absurd, or so it seems, as when Irene Grau proposes to experience an incoherent day completely covered in blue dye. I think of how Derek Jarman used this colour as a metaphor for the blindness he suffered from AIDS, presenting a film whose only image consists of a monochrome blue over which an autobiographical text of the author is recited. Here the relationship is different, less severe but equally ironic, linking directly with the actions of Les incohérents, the Parisian collective formed in the late 19th century by a heterogeneous group of (non)artists whose proposals included a series of satirical monochrome images by the poet Paul Bilhaud and the French humorist Alphonse Allais, who presented absurdly monochrome situations in his album Primo Avrilesque. At the time, the idea of the monochrome arose as a conceptual joke, a graphic critique of the trend towards landscapes such as those of Turner or Whistler. Today, Irene Grau proposes an immersion in the monochrome from a humorous perspective, pushing the possibilities of painting to the extreme. If a few years ago, at the DIDAC Foundation, Irene Grau walked through the green spaces of Santiago de Compostela dressed entirely in green and carrying a green painting to generate a painting understood as a phenomenon of the gaze and as a thought that precedes the work itself, now, at Appleton in Lisbon, she proposes an incoherent day which integrates small everyday pictorial actions infused with blue. This perceptual fissure serves to immerse us in a kind of rollicking and inexorable journey through art history, from Cézanne’s still lifes of blue shadows to the inhabited painting of Helena Almeida and the monochrome spirit of Yves Klein.

Action carried out: 02.04.2022. Photography and audiovisuals: Álex Marco