From the invisible

«A face interior IV» is a vestige. Chafes is a sculptor of unseen. What we see - the visible - are traces, marks. He is an artist who leads us to contemplate the possibility of the invisible, of which the «interior» is a translation. Three aspects deserve comment. First of all, the recursion between the invisible and the visible, between the interior and the exterior, which Chafes operates. It would be better to say that Chafes translates. He claims to himself the figure of the «angel» as a translator or mediator of this possibility of the invisible. Secondly, the distributed dimension of his sculptural work: Chafes is sculpting a single object whose contours are unlikely to be accessible. Any term from your oeuvre it is a clue - a vestige - of something that we don't know what it is (that we will never know what it is) and that unfolds continuously. A distributed object. His work is, contrary to what one might think, one of the most powerful modern emblematizations I know of, where this distributed dimension is undeniable (I remember Duchamp, and it would be interesting to think of Chafes in confrontation with Duchamp, even though it is an exercise that involves numerous risks). Thirdly, I would reaffirm here the vestigial side from which I am born. The objects of which this larger object with improbable outlines (the metaphysical key of his work) are vestiges of a vents. The passage of the invisible (perhaps of a shadow, perhaps of a void). The forms that are contemplated (and that are territorialized in these artifacts of an uncompromising opacity) are exuviae, that is, parts of a body, abandoned parts of a body. We then imagine a creature — an organic entity that cyclically frees itself from fragments (skin, blood, feathers, others). All we see are those fragments. All we have is fragments of that body of the invisible that endlessly metamorphoses and that Chafes' sculptural intelligence allows itself to map.

Luís Quintais
January 2011

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