Timeline of a river sprinkled with a razor: it works in this room, in a turning off and on, the spirit workshop that Ernesto de Sousa was referring to regarding the CAPC. This spirit works here like a book with many sheets, some transparent, others erased and others, even rewritten; a book that risks adding things to the world without giving them a doctrinal meaning. Intersubjectivity, four artists in dialogue, then emerges as a pseudo-”gesamtkunstwerk”. Unexpectedly, in the “Capitalist Realism” of a B–52, the American dream of bombing Hanoi, and in the accumulation of abstract systems of the Manhattan commuter transit system, witnessed in Vostell's serigraphs, the transatlantic duel between Germanic pessimism and “Withmanesc revivalism” (sic Thierry de Duve) that marked the itinerancy of the Fluxus group. The artist's social indifferentiation: being like everyone else implies, yet, and necessarily, guilt and dream. Armando Azevedo atomizes the proper name “Mondego” in a subject who encounters the “absolutism of reality”. “Ego” and “Monde” irking up fragments of immeasurable typographic immeasurability, exorcising the content of a river, turning it backwards like the coming and going of a wooden rocking toy. ”Hommage à Mondego d'Aprés Promio”, the ontological promenade proposed by Pedro Cabral Santo revolves around the different motor skills and inadequacies of perception.
The authenticity of the thing in itself, Coimbra seen from Mondego, is only the repertoire of a deferred, incomplete experience, replaced by its various names. The whisper of a forest patch is presented by Alberto Carneiro as a wave of matter and energy.
A bundle of forces becoming the carrier of a sensitivity, but also its inertia, becoming the awareness that this sensitivity has of its separation from the world of living things and of inert things. In a kind of confrontation and fracture between the one who does it and the world made by itself, Alberto Carneiro shows us how the process of sensitive inadequacy reveals the permanent volatility and deterritorialization of the world. A bundle of forces, of lines that cross the plane of continuity that is reality, the dark reality of the world denouncing the improbable of human achievements. Thus, it would be said that between the all-too-human human cartographies of Vostell and Fluxus's itinerancy and the gap between the inhuman and the human provided by Alberto Carneiro's gesture, we detected in Armando Azevedo the best of mediations or passages. Your Mondego is the sublimation of, of the ego, its reflection, and, at the same time, the liquid landscape of the interior and the darkness that only Carneiro could highlight through traits that denounce, after all, the region of shadows that is beyond the metropolis and its circuits, or so alone, in the opaque spaces that the lines, always the lines, that fascinating vestige of sensitivity and civilization, left, abandoned, underlined.
Pedro Pousada & Luís Quintais
May 2012
Organization
Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra
Assembly
Círculo de Artes Plásticas
Secretarial Work
Ivone Antunes
Text
Pedro Pousada
Luís Quintais
Art Direction
Artur Rebelo
Lizá Ramalho
João Bicker
Graphic Design
José Maria Cunha