ALBERTO CARNEIRO | DIOGO PIMENTÃO | EDUARDO BATARDA | FERNANDO LANHAS | GRAHAM GUSSIN | JOÃO ONOFRE | JOHN BALDESSARI | JORGE PINHEIRO | JUAN ARAUJO | JUAN LUIS MORAZA | JULIÃO SARMENTO | MARLENA KUDLICKA | REGINA DE MIGUEL | TERESA HENRIQUES
Transgenerational, international and one. There is no art without thought, and we cannot think about art without a comprehensive knowledge of the world of forms. In the space that lies between efficient functionality and pure conceptual speculation there are numerous modes of fulfilling the desire to creatively inscribe yourself in the world.
Chronological, the first moment of this show is instrumental in an exercise that progressively unfolds the work of an artist who has always known how to differentiate and subvert as he travelled between the extremes we’ve mentioned in the last paragraph: Fernando Lanhas, artist, architect, investigator and dreamer.
His study of Casa do Espaço (1955-62) refers to a formal speculation on the limits of abstraction of which he was one of the pioneers in Portugal, starting in 1944. On the other hand, we present three surprising cards documenting one of his architectural projects, a residential house in Rua de Grijó, Porto, from 1951. The bauhausian meticulousness of the three photographic compositions reveals the care with which Fernando Lanhas reproduced his architectural creation in two dimensions. Only some details, like the old-fashioned telephone, refer to a time that would be otherwise unrecognizable in the modernity of the images. Closing his participation in the exhibition, a painting from 2011, one year before his death. In its strangeness, the painting reproduces a spatial composition that establishes a dialogue — something akin to an astral resonance — with Casa do Espaço.
Juan Araujo produces a pictorial immersion in the iconic building of the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, designed by the architect Siza Vieira. The artist reveals the geometry produced by the textures of marble and wood materializing in reverberant chromatic surfaces, an exercise that transports us from the spatial reality of the building into the suggestion of the possibility of a painting fashioned as its own spatiality. When the artist reproduces the plan of the building he highlights the double conceptual separation performed by the architectural ideogram as the reproducer of a possible perception of space and of painting as the acknowledgment of this process with a second-degree delay.
If in the sculptures of Jorge Pinheiro (one produced in 1970, the others conceived at the same time, but just recently made) formalization coincides with a period in which the author is close to the most abstract of sciences — math — and the most abstract of the arts — music —, the contrast presented by Marlena Kudlicka and her interest in modern tradition that revolves around the preeminence of the detail of thought as a decisive factor to the precise formalization of a process that relies in the constant measuring of this uncertainty. Attempt and error are assumed as decisive components of the resulting sculptures, which reinterpret the lines of action that the authors of the post-minimalism integrated in a horizon that blended minimal rigor with the attention to the foundational sculpture of the early modernism.
The clarity of the shapes produced by these two artists is counterbalanced by the nocturnal drawings by Julião Sarmento, O espaço entre as coisas (the space between things), from 1990. Here, images recede before their definition, pointing towards a somnambulist informality. The space between image and its interpretation, the space between desire and anxiety, the space between the figure and the background diluting in a magma of perceptual tension.
An absolute contrast, the drawings by Alberto Carneiro — dating from last April — constitute a kind of diary and are grounded in a solar vision of a nature that is conceptualized in articulations which are distant from each other both in space and time. Archetypes of a primordial order, they are fascinating in the measure that their timelessness coincides with a precise date, as if they were a diagram of the artist’s compulsive serenity.
The solar dimension of Graham Gussin’s works points towards a perceptual shift that sets the boundaries of an undecided and mutant reality. In his drawings we see projected the complex and impossible shadows of four iron pieces that emerge from a concrete surface. Constellations that challenge the logic of our vision. In the video Silver Form, a slithering form gains life as it is blown by the wind, its metal surface reflecting scintillations of almost cosmic reverberations. An entity with its own life performing a contingent choreography of luminous reflections.
In her installations, Regina de Miguel establishes a hermeneutical hiatus as she positions herself between scientific credibility, narrative speculation on historical discourses, and the credibility of the archive’s iconography. Questioning how truth is constructed in these different areas of knowledge — science, history, and culture — the artist brings us closer to a more critical stance towards a reality that is here seen as overlapping narratives susceptible to subjective classification.
In a distant, but yet parallel plane, Juan Luis Moraza questions the conventions both of our pragmatic daily experiences, but also those of artistic reception. With their undulating folds, his pieces de-functionalize the otherwise necessary straightness of measuring tools while producing an irony on the historical weight of the plinth effect, i.e. the transformation and putative auratic requalification of the object when it stands on this classical and recurrent display device.
The works of Eduardo Batarda also make use of irony and of an irreverent vision of the truth of painting as a representation that signifies reality or is the possibility for escaping it, into a transcendent dimension. Oscillating forms, between the tattoo and the gut, organs without body that fall upon the spectator like spots in the high tradition of painting. A tradition that is here reinvented with a seriousness that contrasts the cynicism, the arrogance, and even the ignorance that pervade these difficult moments of contemporary painting.
John Baldessari short-circuits another convention: the automatic readability of images. In a context where we are constantly overwhelmed by the presence of images in our environment, we are often arrogant enough to believe that images can be decoded using basic and simple devices. In Baldessari’s works, the lazy belief in this simplicity is shattered as he highlights, inverts, appropriates, signals and re-formalizes their original references — a process in which humor intersects the conceptual desire to add significant images to the linearity of the irrelevant and plain image.
The project by João Onofre, Promise of the Sculpture, replicates the contractual legality of agreements between sellers and buyers, here in a dimension that establishes principles of trust where the plausibility of an artistic project — in its conceptual emergence — supersedes the end result. An allegory of the belief in the value of art as a project of shared responsibility between creator and recipient, as a shared complicity in the inwards of the internal mechanisms of creation as an announced possibility.
Procedural and signifying randomness characterize the pieces by Diogo Pimentão which are here presented. Throwing small pieces of graphite leads onto small square surfaces, marking the position where they fall and connecting them in a later drawing, the artist suggests a game between the imponderable and the propositional, a dimension that reclaims a space of conceptual indecisiveness we have already addressed in the case of Marlena Kudlicka’s sculpture, but which is here presented in a way that is both more structuring and more closed. This is, in Pimentão’s piece one can identify decisions that overlay an initial randomness, while in the works by Kudlicka indecision is revealed in its formal capacity.
Ending the show, Opening Piece by Teresa Henriques — a piece commissioned for this exhibition. A disturbing object in its displacement, this stethoscope, carefully stored in a box, can be used by the viewer and gives him/her access to a sound piece that produces a double perception of the situation of being in the exhibition space. If, on the one hand, it isolates the viewer giving him or her the possibility to escape the surrounding noise and to hear his/her own heart (the object’s primary and most common function), on the other hand the manipulation of the device triggers a voice that asks the viewer what he/she is doing there in an intimidating and aggressive way. Public and private collide in a restlessness of induced thoughts.
Covering different historical, geographic and aesthetic realities, this exhibition reveals a concern that questions the capacity of gestures and representation to constitute themselves as the enunciations of the thought-of-another, precisely the one being offered to the spectator as a form of artistic thought.
One in its proposal, this exhibition is based on a multiplicity of answers. It is in the speculative contamination of the voids that exist between these works of art that one can better learn the relevance of what we insist on calling art.
Miguel von Hafe Pérez
May 2016