Figures of the continuum

For fifteen years, Filipe Feijão built a proto-museological structure — surely one of the most extraordinary utopic and visionary projects carried out in the last couple of decades in Portugal — which, in practice, functioned as an extension of his Caldas da Rainha studio.

Relative or heir to many more or less known structures that some artists have been building since the beginning of the 20th century (Merzbau de Schwitters, for example), this large-scale piece became the habitat of an extensive and varied set of weird things in themselves and in one another — plants, cacti, fossils, whale bones, ceramics, wood beams, and other objects.

This singular and monumental piece does not refer so much to curiosity offices or wonder chambers. One could say the structure was thought of and built to welcome wider thinking and practice of sculpting. Therefore, it is a propitiatory structure, a desiring machine of sorts, open to multiplicity and which, strictly speaking, thematizes diversity as a last stronghold of the sculptural of thought, irreducible to the subjection of form.

Therefore, and for this very reason, the piece he chose to show at CAPC is enigmatic. It is made from the material transposition of a fragment lying in the structure whose physical apparatus seems to refer to the neoclassicism language in every way — the hieratic form, the appearance of the ruin, the anthropomorphism of the pose (as if it were a vision of Marat in his bathtub-tomb). However, that affiliation is merely apparent; it is rather an organic vision, a figure of the continuum.

All of Filipe Feijão’s work has, indeed, revolved around the possibility of thinking of sculpting as a transit between this world and another, an age-old question that sculptors have always debated over: how to balance body and matter, life and death, negative and positive, form and breath.

Nuno Faria