CHRISTIAN ANDERSSON | JUAN ARAUJO | VACO BARATA | FILIPA CÉSAR | LUÍS PAULO COSTA | JOÃO ONOFRE | JULIÃO SARMENTO | NUNO SOUSA VIEIRA | RUI TOSCANO

"All to Wall" is an exhibiting proposal to take place in two sequential moments of the gallery’s program.

The first part of the exhibit will present works by Christian Andersson, Juan Araujo, Vasco Barata, Filipa César, Luís Paulo Costa, João Onofre, Julião Sarmento, Nuno Sousa Vieira, and Rui Toscano.

The second part, due in September, will reveal different artistic proposals and eventually other issues will come to the fore at the gallery.

The exhibit tends towards an idea of impermanence, or of passage, regardless of the sense of each artistís work or of the different media used and installation proposals. What is sought here is to establish a possible, yet not inevitable, route, uncovering the less obvious relations and traces that may eventually amplify our imagination and summon poetic, inter-textual and semantic relationships from an idea of spatiality.

To this we must add a second look over the gallery space, in order to re-update it by means of a simple intervention - the building of a wall. This intervention is the single permanent element, common to both exhibiting proposals, and allows us to re-evaluate spatial determinations, in the sense that it establishes the place where the exhibition is held, and thus an integral part of the construction of the discursive route the visitor will follow in a connection intended as close as possible, bringing to the forefront the work of the body as a central element of one’s relationship to each piece.

However, the presence of architecture or its transformation – even if temporary – can ultimately reshape the space retributively as a condition of that very dialectic possibility, in the sense Daniel Buren assigns to it and which is transcribed below, from an essay published in 1975:

“Every place radically imbues (formally, architecturally, sociologically, politically) with its meaning the object (work/creation) shown there. Art in general refuses to be implied a priori and so pretends to ignore or reject the draconian role imposed by the museum (the gallery), a role both cultural and architectural. To reveal this limit (this role), the object presented and its place of display must dialectically imply one another.” 1

To be continued .../...

João Silvério

1 Cf. Daniel Buren, “Function of Architecture, Notes on work in connection with the places where it is installed taken between 1967 and 1975, some of which are specially summarized here”, Thinking about Exhibitions, London and New York: Routledge, 2002 (new edition), p. 315.