“Art always occupies the place of the sacred”, so Alberto Carneiro responded to Carlos Antunes' invitation to occupy the head of the secularized chapel of Santa Cruz, in Coimbra, with an ochomé wood sculpture that embodies a haiku.

Haiku is a concise form of Japanese poetry characterized by the juxtaposition of images or ideas, and which is based on a matrix of Buddhist thought. In Buddhist philosophy, each element of the universe, at any level, is closely connected to the others by internal relations, thus rejecting the division between mind and matter, subject and object with regard to the constitution of the cosmos. It means that awareness about the world and about the things found in it is neither above nor below the ground, nor can it be reduced to anything objective. Rather, it involves concrete existence, through the connection of being to its terrain, by the telluric force exerted on the human being — something that sculpture “Sobre um haiku de Bashô escrito em Ise” (1995-2003) corporalizes. Consisting of articulated wooden elements, it rises from the floor up to 2.84 meters in height, in a fluid way, not to detach from the ground, but to evoke a connection between the ethereal and the material.

So what sacred does the sculptor refer to? The sacred has different meanings in Western philosophy (based on Christian culture) and Eastern philosophy (based on Buddhism). While Western thinking about existence is determined by the idea of being, Eastern thought is guided by the idea of nothingness or emptiness, notions with no negative connotation for Buddhism. On the contrary, the notions of nothing or emptiness mean existence in potential, the possibility of becoming. Empty space that may coincide with death or nihilism, but also with the beginning and the origin of meaning — a force that the sculptor elevates to the dimension of the sacred. Sacred is life, the capacity to produce representation and through it to evoke what is beyond physical and factual matter. Only through representation can the finitude of the human being be overcome, his being time and place. It is precisely in this disappointing observation of incompleteness, of human finitude, that the birth of the creative gesture lies. In this, and for Alberto Carneiro in particular, the body as a source and tool for the production of knowledge, offering the inexorable awareness of time and place, plays an active part in the formulation of representation. Through the haiku sculpture, and its body, we are led to go through and close a cycle, going from the underground to the surface of the ground, from the trunk of the tree, from the end of the canopy to the air, and from here, again, in fall, to the original bed.

Sara Antónia Matos