Lugar Casa

Drawing is transversal to the most diverse contemporary artistic practices and despite the different approaches — eminently conceptual, narrative or informal — it is often (and here too) a daily activity of registering a place, its characteristics and history(s).

And of all places, home is one that, as a territory of personal affirmation, a stage for daily actions and a repository of everyday objects, contains in itself the most common characteristics and functions.

The works that make up the exhibition indicate, or denounce, the choice of objects for this daily use and the way in which they relate to practices circumscribed to vacancies house, containing traces, memories and marks of that experience.

The works presented performatize and they contest the insignificance of each small activity and of each object used, and highlight the role of improvisation and chance in the construction of a unique identity and experience.

The artwork Museu de coisas insignificantes deliberately retrieves the eponymous book of poems by Charles Kiefer. A possible interpretation of his poems tells us that accepting this museum means accepting that insignificant things can finally have meaning; not their own, unique and immutable meaning, but an assigned and permeable meaning; it will also imply the acceptance that the entire museum is made up of insignificant things and that the meaning (and value) of these things is not contained in them but in the relationship that we can maintain with them.

What has just been said about the museum is easily transposed into the daily life of each one of us: a cumulative process of selecting objects, practices, gestures and places, aimed at building a routine and at the same time its possibility of escape.

Many times this escape or Disruption it happens accidentally or almost unconsciously — the result of chance. Impendable and unpredictable chance adds and distracts, but it also shapes and shapes our history and what we are.

Rita Gaspar Vieira transforms the raw material paper, confronting weight and two-dimensionality, into objects of particular and delicate beauty but also into monumental records and memories, inscribed, embedded and composed of heavy, dark graphite.

Marca d’água replicates the two-wall plinth of one of the rooms of the Círculo Sede (house). This formal and chromatic mimicry (since the room is also black), emphasized by the displacement of the mold in relation to the model, gives the piece its value as a reproduction and record of the characteristics of the room itself.

Everyday life — its routines, its absences, its accidents, its choices, its scars, its escapes, its actions and its consequences are the raw material, subject and program of the works in the exhibition, embodying trichotomy at every moment verb – action – registration.

Andreia Poças
April 2014