Look at a painting.

Over and over and over again, to unlearn. Learn not to see. Leave, go and seek the rare breath of an inner light, touching the silence before sounds and smells are extinguished, shadows of things only interviews and other more remote ones remembered as if they were truths and that, perhaps out of fear, we judged for our own moments.

I'm not talking to you. I couldn't tell you how some, those others who know, the lips moving forgotten. On the way, from my deafness I sense this rumor that in my wake I would like to smooth out the design of my walk.

I took other paths. Almost undone, dust from a sky that lost its tears, the time running out for my eyes in those walking steps. But first, I will bring all the stones and make a house in which to say their names and the places where they came from. And also the traits, reflections, and colors where I saw them, those of the land higher up, those on the other side of all waters, some from afar where the night rises bigger than the light.

I don't know how the first one went. One must have been. Others, after that, came, some will arrive later, I know, I saw the numbers of their time and those of mine lined up over all the walls. A unique light, which they bring, faint, almost everything that are the few things we know how to name, a flower, the hands, that tree, some clouds, a shell, the infinite clarity of a black square, a dog's head diagonally across a wall, tears on a bloody face, a horse illuminated with horror. Look at the painting.

In silence, this came to me. It came from hours a long time ago, from places and perspectives that were almost perfect, of pure colors, unique in its vastness far beyond what the hands could reach and I now know that it is true, and that it will remain so, because one day a woman told me about her son, that he had desperately squeezed her small hand, and that she had come to her with the same sadness of a certain painting that they had seen in the city where, golden, the stone floats above the waters.

Pedro Cabrita Reis
Lisbon, October 12, 2010, it's almost daylight.
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Santa Cruz

With Altar Piece #2, by Pedro Cabrita Reis, CAPC is continuing a series of exhibitions at the head of Café Santa Cruz, an emblematic place in the 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 of Santa Cruz is the most recent; in a place with this “excess of historical awareness”, 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 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 of 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, forcing the subject who observes it to convalesce from the deterministic pathos of the picturesque, the “easy”, the “expectable”, the “similar”, forcing him to paraphrase Kant, to “audare sapare (dare 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 an I (I am Imago, so I am an exaggeration) this) 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