An unfinished proposition

I begin with what lies behind, above and below this work by José Pedro Croft: the wall of the Santa Cruz café, a fragment of the Universal Wall invented by man to give finitude to what is extensive, to root out the report, the disconnection. Our insecurities, our fear of anonymity, lack of scale and horizon are embodied in their surfaces; the walls (now I speak in the plural because I add all those that were part of the forms created by José Pedro Croft) have never rested in our struggle for a narrative that gives us positional breath, that tells our story: frescoes, ornaments, frames, urns, cavities, niches, recesses, secret passages, clichés, family portraits, myths, disobedience, iconoclasm, autographs, multiple, bullet impacts, fire, fat, Viscera, life... everything is spread on the erect slopes of this muscle; the host of our perversions, of the impossibility of harmonizing what we want to possess from the world, of this beautiful and stupid world. All of this is denoted and condensed in the post-humanist object with which Croft confronts the worldliness of that reformed wall of sacred life. Art does not free us, nor does it transform us, because we came too late (and it came too soon); our codes don't fit, the verb doesn't resolve the image and it doesn't obey it, but if it doesn't see us it holds in itself, in potential, the expectation that there's more to the world than the redundancies of a bourgeois place or the nostalgia for an integral unity of the subjects in an ancient order. The world of Croft, a world of montages, overlays, asymmetries, complex spatial relations, of formal (and intertextual) games where different materials and ways of making intersect, this world does not promise us the reconciliation of aesthetics and experience but rather nourishes the desire to prolong the moved (aesthetic) admiration for what is wild and unexpected in the salient aspects of order, of good form. It forces us to think that there is a part of the visible that we cannot touch, a part of the space that we will not reach, and that everyday life, perishable and archivable, contains more than is contained in us... we can see our reflection, our appearance projected on it but we are not there, it exists in spite of us, it exists without us. And referring specifically to the work exhibited here and to self-referenceality, to the misadaptation in relation to the recognizable that defines it, we can affirm that Croft interrupts the passivity and annoyance of human things being useful and making sense. And this interruption is not only a provocation (and therefore an ethical act) but a necessity to identify true beauty (this work) from false beauty.

Pedro Pousada
July 2015
 

Territory and Action

This new cycle is included in the program of strategies aimed at civil society, which involve placing some of the CAPC's activities in places in the city with greater demographic circulation; it is specifically intended to capture the attention of those who do not regularly attend the CAPC or are not even aware of their role in the production and dissemination of contemporary artistic production and thus socialize the artistic and symbolic added value that is realized in the different spaces of the CAPC (CAPC Sereia, CAPC Sede). From an expectant cultural space that awaits its spectators, its visitors, a space representing the contemporary artistic field, the CAPC would assume a social contract with the anonymous citizenship of Coimbra, migrate its contents to the Civita Augescens circle, that is, to the dynamic interior of Coimbra, to its capacity to receive and welcome others, to the culture of multi-ethnicity and supranationality that define the city's efforts to get away from demographic and economic decline.

It is the CAPC that descends to the city, questioning and disconcerting citizens, mobilizing everyday life, promoting critical reception capacity. The general Territory and Action cycle will consist of four cycles: Santa Cruz, Espelho, Linha defensiva do Mondego, and Link.

Santa Cruz

The CAPC begins with the sculptural piece «A face interior IV» by Rui Chafes, a series of exhibitions at the head of Café Santa Cruz, an emblematic place in coimbrã downtown and still today a space that polarizes many local synergies.

Instead of the altar, in the “head of Christ”, a series of artistic initiatives will be organized critically and reflectively exploring the protocols of representation in a society that is itself profoundly iconocratic and marked by distracting, escapist and growing semantic ambiguity processes of mediation.

In a place that, in the first phase, had a monosemic and prescriptive position, anchored the liturgy of the divine, the sounds, textures, smells, the visual impact of those moments, and which, due to the obstacles, inhibitions and anxieties of great history, was accommodated to new functions of which the inclusive, plural, tertualian Café de Santa Cruz is the most recent; in a place with this “excess of historical awareness”, the CAPC proposes to reheem a dialogue with the city in which it lives and does so through the artistic problem (what is art? when is there art?) , a problem that in the last fifty years he has been debating, trying to clarify but also to undetermine; the investigative attention proposed by the CAPC in the face of this problem is expressed here, at this initial moment, both in its condition of experience, of something that is extrinsic, that is of the order of the subject who observes, who lives together, and in his condition, a significant form of work.

This CAPC initiative is added to a theme, the protocols of representation, which persists and is refined in the contemporary artistic object with other practical outcomes.

Indeed, the historical permutations established by the modernist symbolic revolution between an aesthetic of comparison (the narrative dramatization of the apparent narrative, the dialectic between verisimilitude and artifice, between secrecy and transparency) and an aesthetic of appearance (of the named and the unrepresentable) are not only audible but also active in today's artistic practice.

By dismissing the Imitatio as the only active principle of the act of representation (of repositioning in the world) the artistic culture of the 20th century, regardless of the proposed paradigm or periodization, opened up to the spectator (even the most inexperienced) new possibilities for negotiation and poetic mobilization in their relationship with the lived world. This Art brought human interest closer to artistic interest, even though it was residual, forcing the subject who observes to convalesce from the deterministic pathos of the picturesque, of the “easy”, of the “expected”, of the “similar”, forcing him to paraphrase Kant, to “audare sapare (dares to know)”. Whether it succeeded will be another discussion.

It is certain, however and contradictorily, that when nothing is recognizable, when not only the spectator's perceptual search is prolonged but also defamiliarized, it becomes strange, difficult to interpret what is seen, Art, (and the works that will be exhibited here will speak of it), develops, (perfecting, criticizing, renewing the mechanisms of representation), a historical effort to root “We” and “Them” on the same conceptual plane, that is, the correlation of forces between the I (I am Imago, so I am an exaggeration) and the difference of the Other (the persistence of others anthropologies of identity and of the perception and representation of the world); Art trains us to question the world outside of our ends, of our preconceptions. And it is this effort that is also positive here in the headwaters of Santa Cruz.

Pedro Pousada and Carlos Antunes
January 2012