«Only the man for whom the world is a foreign country is perfect.»

Hugo de São Vitor (Teólogo Saxão, XIIth century)
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Landscape design is, among many other things, the cultural effect of a conflict between the historical need for modernization and the melancholy of a separation that the nerve flow of the boulevards and the bureaucracy had produced; a conflict, in which hunting, sports, thermal baths, picnics, country walks, camping, the naturalization of the weekend, constituted the most mundane, the most physical dimension. The subject, bourgeois and owner (fleeing the processes of desacralization, the separation between ego and totality that the political and economic revolution of his class had invented), had rediscovered his animality in these new habits but needed an archadic redemption, aesthetic compensation, and landscape design seemed to fulfill this task, assuming itself as the pictorial dissonance between the picturesque and the sublime, between comfort (and selfish delight) and tragedy (the feeling of the natural form as the loss of scale, the irrelevance of human). The pride of his work, his achievements and the terror of his end and the indifferent silence of the totality seem to nourish the relationship of the good bourgeoisie with the landscape. There is nothing of his own there, his identity dissolves, obscures, loses positional strength and yet the bourgeois is moved, enchanted; he wants to morbidly reproduce the optical, holistic sensation of this loss; he wants to replace the risks, the danger, the unpredictability of “being there”, on the cliff next to a stormy sea, in an Alpine glacier, in a Canyon labyrinthine, in the unhealthy style of a Tuscan countryside, protected by the pictorial screen. This danger is frozen in a fiction: the landscape. (...)

Everything I said so far derives and is strengthened by the images that Pedro Vaz proposes to us and the way in which he mediatizes them in the CAPC space; not least because the dimension here is not picturesque, descriptive, but analytical, controlled, planned, in a repertoire that brings together Robert Smithson's site/nonsite dualism — the combination of abstract knowledge and existential experience of Corot's naturalism but also that of Courbet — the empiria of plein air and the compositional coherence of the atelier — in this case the walking adventures of Pedro Vaz and his work on the assembly table. The organization of the exhibition (in structures that simulate traditional pictorial surfaces, wooden canvases, but which are no more than supports a projection) immediately confronts us with the problem of reception and its automatisms: since our view is partial, incomplete, as we are invariably subject to conditioning in which our subjectivity assimilates the data, (the document of an alien experience) but is kept away from the different synchronies of the sphere of the lived (of that lived).

Pedro Pousada
Coimbra, January 2014
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With Stimmung, Pedro Vaz takes up the concept of nature and landscape developed by Georg Simmel (1858–1918) in his seminal text “Philosophy of Landscape”. A walking artist, the modern tradition of Richard Long or Hamish Fulton, Pedro Vaz exhibits eight video projections that record, or rather, that testify to this full encounter between the artist and nature.

They are works that are very slow to execute, just as slow is the time that the artist requires for their enjoyment. The editing was also a long process, continuously discussed for more than a year, and with an editing that lasted for 15 intense days, refining every detail, every angle of attack on the works, the precise dimension of each projection.

This short catalog records the uniqueness of his work, because Pedro Vaz executes a work of art precisely because the mountain, or the river, all nature is there, in dialogue with himself, the two subjects of an action, the artist immersed in nature, in an abyss, — in a recent series, Pedro Vaz literally plunged into a water line towards the source — as the photograph that accompanies this text tautologically illustrates.

At the Círculo, we nurture the idea of continuity in the relationship with the artists. Artists grow with the institution and allow the institution to grow with them. It has been like this for 55 years and will continue to be so. For all these reasons, we believe that this is only the first episode of an encounter that will be long and fruitful and this catalog serves to testify to that first meeting and to make public our thanks and admiration for Pedro Vaz, his work, the one of which is not distinguished from the other.

Carlos Antunes