António Contador
Hugues Decointet
Simeon Nelson
Pedro Penilo
Anabela Santos
Julião Sarmento
Carlos Sousa
Curator
Mário Caeiro
Objet Perdu. The art which is truly contemporary
is suspicious of the glittering aura that the industry assigns it.
Preferring the path of imagination (Marcuse), this art resists
the commodification of its processuality and finds its value
in cognition. A sense of auto-poesis projects it into the darkness
of the future. It is the territory of the self-sufficiency of the device.
Sacrifice and loss; this is the art that loses itself in order to find itself.
About the artists and the works
At PLATAFORMA, art is a field of encounters, an open language, idea at work. The intimate dimension of the space called for an exhibition founded upon the idea of object, of the work of art embedded in a symbolic circuit in which knowledge, sharing, comments, occur in the proximity of particular objects. Objet Perdu is an exhibition which departs from that premise, understanding it as contingent territory. In it, a couple of references and hypotheses, left suspended – as in an aphorism or in a poem – put each work in a dialogue not only with the others, with the space and its identity, but inserted in an argumentary about the contemporaneity of art.
Pedro Penilo has a long carreer in visual art and intermedia, namely in the Czech Republic, where he made his studies (Prague Academy of Fine Arts). Once back in Portugal, he proceeded his reflections and interventions, mostly in the field of communication, where he constantly reinvents the everyday language of pictograms and criticizes the modus operandi of mass media. In anunciação, afeganistão the artist manipulates newspaper spreads, in a commentary on the subversion capitalism imposed on the original role assigned to the media. For Penilo, the mediatic emporium, monopolist and global, substitutes the narrative and dialectical explanation of reality for the production of reality, for its own narrative and self-explanation, by means of the devices of aesthetization, mutilation, codification and artificialization, that is, by the reproduction of ideology.
António Contador’s work, as Penilo’s, is a performative perception of the affections and genereous involvement of the intellectual in the public sphere. He presents six 45rpm vinyl records, containing the reading of postcards from Praia da Rocha, Portimão, dating back to from 1919 to 1971.
French artist Hugues Decointet reflects upon the status of image in movement and as a specific modality in visual culture. His project Blanche Neige, dedicated to César Monteiro (and Robert Walser), in pre-production since 2004, is an approach to inexplored possibilities of cinema. Screen Paintings, first shown at FIAC in 2006, is a luminous video installation that dislocates certain notions of cinema and painting: the screen becomes a canvas; the light of the projections becomes fixed coloured shape; the words become animated images… The artist used a special paint on only apparently white canvases, onto which ultraviolet light is projected. The effect is of a very present and luminous set of objects.
Simeon Nelson is a London-based British artist and professor of sculpture at University de Hertfordshire. During the fifteen months of an artistic residency at the Royal Geographical Society, Nelson worked with researchers on thousands of maps, focusing on maps that consider mythical places as physical locations, as well as the evolution of Western cartography and the shifting in philosophical and global perspectives of the past 1,000 years. This was the origin of Cryptosphere, which the artist perceives as ‘the sum of all withheld and hidden information in a given system’. In this modular sculptoric system, Nelson has developed a kairotic response to complex mapping methodologies that contain multiple layers of meaning through the creation of a new body of work, specifically locating the mythological and ornamental within the physical and temporal world: El Dorado, Utopia and Hell are addressed alongside the development of cartography as a science via a large gallery installation in which a cartographically-inspired architectural grid attempts to contain ambiguous ornaments that, unwilling to be held by the grid’s rigid embrace, spill into the pavilion. This becomes an ambiguos non-place, part of and yet not part of the Earth…
Carlos Sousa recently concluded his studies at ESAD.CR in Caldas da Rainha art school. His work introduces a set of limit-situations in our everyday relation with the devices which surround us. His installations are redemptive approaches to randomness. For Objet Perdu a new work departs from his usual themes – such as recently displayed in the individual exhibition at Biblioteca GCT-UNL in Caparica, also curated by Mário Caeiro – to lead us to reflect about the imminent ‘death’ of the incandescent bulb…
Anabela Santos also studied at ESAD.CR and completed her studies in 2008. She integrated the collective show TERROIR/GRAFFITTI, also at Biblioteca FCT-UNL, where she presented the new developments of her work on the theme of feather/lightness. In Objet Perdu she presents one large-scale serigraphy and a set of 27 of her many A5 ink on paper prints/drawings.
Julião Sarmento is one of the most notorious Portuguese artists, with an international career spanning more than 30 years. He reinvents his oeuvre within his sparse but suggestive language, his sense of mise-en-scène of the body and eroticism with a conceptual rigour and a constancy that never falls into academicism. Peça variável – 5 intervenientes integrated Alternativa Zero in 1977. By means of its processuality and the dispersed nature of the artistic gesture, the work easily fits an idea of avant garde art as it was defined on the threshold of the 80’s. As an oblique and convivial approach to the themes of the body and desire that would become his trademarks, what matters here – in this show – is something else. This piece makes explicit a meta-discursivity, aware of its own conventions and those of the artworld and social/cultural milieu within which the artist operates. Its insertion in the show is a homage to Ernesto de Sousa, considered one of the progenitors of Post-Modernism, an aesthetic operator who, with Alternativa Zero, introduced Portugal to the collective exhibition as critical curatorial model.
