ANA JOTTA | ANDRÉ ROMÃO | JOÃO LOURO | JOÃO PAULO FELICIANO | JULIÃO SARMENTO | LUÍS PAULO COSTA | LUÍSA CUNHA | RICARDO JACINTO

Chinese Curios

Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. The Chinese practice of copying books was thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key to China’s enigmas.
Walter Benjamin, “Chinese Curios”, One Way Street.

This is an exhibition of copies, an exhibition where we try to think the place of the copy in the processes inherent to artistic production. It does not aim to represent an anatomy of the artistic gesture, nor to be a didactic attempt to understand the relevance of the copy within a universe composed by a heterogeneous group of artists.

On the contrary, this exhibition is about the copy as a creative principle that, depending on the tradition and the historical moment we refer to, is recognized as quote, appropriation, imitation, or reproduction. It is about the action of copying as an aesthetic principle. According to Walter Benjamin, and as he wrote in the text that names this show, copying is not an exterior action, but an indication of the movement of the soul as it perceives what it is exterior, strange, and alien to it.

The exhibition deliberately intensified and dramatized these copying actions and, because of this, this is also an

engraving/printing exhibition: all artists produced new work and, regardless of their usual media of choice. They used engraving (one of the noblest copy techniques), with its possibilities and limitations, to create artworks that are originally copies, imitations, or reproductions: copies that create originals, originals continued in the body and imagination of others.

The artworks do not follow any formal or material criterion, but the affinities between them are subterranean, expressing themselves in the internal principles shared by all. The result is not only an expansion of the territory ascribed to engraving, but also an expansion of the grammar of the copy.

Nuno Crespo