It is
very tough to relate what I shall. The sentiment of cowardice and of delusion
is inevitable. However, experience is teaching me the relevant lesson of
simplicity, intuition and humbleness.
For the exhibition
that was the final assessment of a module in my MA Course at The University of
Northampton, I was going to undertake an endeavor entirely new in my
experiences.
After some time working in a studio, and after long
months fighting against it and against myself, I started to understand it and
my own self. The marriage came to be so profound that my gaze started to lay
upon it as to admire in the means of a living processual work. I was then going to
transplant this external organ of mine into the bodiless body of a white cube.
However, when transported to be transplanted, the new
body rejected the organ and it suddenly started to rot.
Intuition and despair yelled and I asked for help. In
my rescue came one of the wisest men I've ever met, my course leader Dr. Craig
Staff. Many words of profound clarity and diplomacy coming from him made me
understand what I needed to understand and already knew from the start: abort the transplant.
I suffered, I felt guilty, I felt weak. However, I
also felt grateful for my intuition and for that wise man.
The work of the artist does not differ very much from that
of the monk. It is about listening, understanding and being silent most of the
times, but above all of precise action when needed, if needed.
"The Cabinet", how it was going to be
called, did not come to be as imagined. It is in a limbo, in the realm of ideas
and in the dimension of the "what was almost something at a given moment".
Down below follows the proposition I wrote for what I
thought would come to be in a given moment. It is a grave stone of a birth dead child.
"The Cabinet" latent still in the studio space
The process of transporting the pieces
The walking dismembered cabinet
The rejection of the organ by the new body.
The Cabinet,
2012
The work “The Cabinet” derives from the Idea
that every work of art is an índex of the presence of the artist and that any
work is the conscious or unconscious unfolding of all the experiences lived by
this artist. A particular work of art is the result of a particular moment
suspended in time in which all the different vectors of influence culminate
into that particular piece. With this the notion of existence of the artist as
a living being with fragilities and complexities is brought to the forefront
not as an opposition to the romantic image, but as a parallel to that, with the
practitioner always bending from one side to the other.
My work generally establishes by simple visual
statements that open wide discussions making my understanding of the world
direct and intentional. However profoundly connected to my own experiences, as
underlined before, the work was never intentionally autobiographical. On the
other hand, intentionality never deprived it from connections to my own
experiences. The work started to more and more yell to me about my own presence
in the work, by the clear relations of my decisions in life directly parallel
to the one in the works.
Since the first moments in my experiences as an
artist as I know myself nowadays, the artistic propositions were always
distinct between each other being difficult to find a coherence between all of
them. Time started to show me that the discussion was about human presence
within the world, and the idea of trying to understand ways to deal with a
material experience while we are so filled with subjectiveness. Time also
showed me that in fact that was my own discussion as a human being as a whole,
not just as an artist, and started to perceive how intertwined life and work
were since the beginning. All the things I were attracted to, materially,
conceptually, all had this same discussion and coherence in one way or another.
The life of the artist was not being just intertwined with the work, but it is
self was revealing to be the ouvre.
These are the principles of “The Cabinet”. The
studio, that can clearly been seen as the indexical physical presence of the
process of the artist, started to come to be coherent towards my understanding.
It’s visual presence, the concepts, the memories involved in each object were
all asking to be seen and understood in the manner I am starting to see now and
present here in this text.
These statements are made not because the
artist is a chosen mystical figure above all other humans, to the contrary, he
is just an existing material being dealing with the questions of the world. The
work deals with existing in the world both the material and immaterial notions
of this, its realities and fictions. The dealing with existence and it’s main
philosophical questions are what I am dealing with. The incomprehensible
melancholy of being human, all too human. This is what brought me once again to
a work that has been following me for some time, Albricht Dürer’s Melancolia
(1514) which narrative deals with the question of the strive to understand
existence. Mathematical objects are left on the floor, puzzles are all over the
place and also do the figures in the image that look desperate to understand
their place in the world and seem tired from the endless attempts with no
precise answers.
I first noticed the studio as coherent within
itself as a work should be when I took a picture with my mobile, posted it on
Facebook and called it “O Gabinete do Dr. Moraes” or “The Cabinet of Dr. Moraes”
as a silly and unpretentious joke relating my studio and name to Robert Wiene’s
film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. Then it all came to be in my mind after a
few days.
I started to see my studio as a cabinet of
curiosities, a mathematician’s classroom, a monk’s cell or an alchemist’s laboratory.
All these where metaphors that always have followed and intrigued me for, in
one way or another, these figures are always in an attempt to understand,
having one answer produce so many other questions. The objects I collected all
had these connections without a deliberate thought of ever putting them
together. They all related to each other and the vector of that was myself. In
some way what I do in the work is to reveal the artist fully naked, letting the
readings of the work be made by the observer, letting he or she apprehend and
read from the indexes left in the instalation.
In some way even my blog
(www.invisiblegeometry.blogspot.com), which since the beginning of the MA
course has been a testimony of my life/work experiences, speaks about the constitution
of the artist as a being in process, my studio, my things and of my human
existence. It itself started in some way to behave as a work, a living work,
always changing, growing, creating narratives of its own.
It is relevant to bring back the idea of
reality and fiction. The work, although full of ‘truth’ in the sense that the
objects where acquired without any deliberate attempt to bring them together,
the studio was transported into another space and reassembled according to my
own intentions, being this place a limbo between the extremes of reality and
fiction, truth and spectacle. And all this, inevitably brings the discussion of
the white cube. If the studio was to be seen in the studio, it would be just a
studio. The studio within the gallery space is not just a studio, it is
intention, it is a statement and it is work.
“The Cabinet”, therefore is an index of the
human presence, a manifesto of the will of the artist and a proposition of engagement
towards the observer that cannot be and will not be accepted by the work as a
passive receiver.
