This is the artist’s first exhibition in Portugal and the inaugural exhibition of our new gallery. Blake Rayne is acknowledged to be one of the principal artists of his generation. For over twenty years, he has shown extensively in the North America and Europe.
At the center of Carbon Days, Rayne imports a work singled out from A Perfect Moment, Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial exhibition in Washington D.C. from 1989. The particular picture that Rayne has serialized and presented as a mural for the exhibition, is Jim and Tom, Sausalito, Mapplethorpe 1977’ – a work that even today, continues to challenge certain filing systems.
Drawing upon legacies of non-composition – such as chance operations and seriality–while exploiting the inherent plasticity of synthetic paint, Rayne presents a series of 7 works titled Terroir (Sunday – Saturday) from 2017. These are shown with a new group of oil paintings depicting images sourced from widely circulated archaeological reconstructions of Neanderthal skulls (Skull Slope, Skull Loch).
Approaching these skulls as objects of discovery, Rayne reconsiders the relationship between the modernist myth of primitivism and the persisting presumptions of 20th century art-making. “Now paintings are skulls,” he quite simply replies, when questioned about their subject matter. Perhaps by Rayne’s logic, if now paintings are skulls, then skulls are a kind of stanchion–suspensions between a recent past and a yet-to-come. Throughout the exhibition Rayne has constructed a series of sculptural works from plastic bottles and locally sourced Portuguese ocean water, Stanchion 1-4. These works of plastic Fanta bottles and mined fluid, populate a scene in which the works function as a script for division and displacement.
The confrontations that Rayne provokes are varied: objects that evoke both gestural and pixelated imagery among barricades that question the liminal traps of subjectivity, history, and authorship. All signs, rendered freshly inoperative, become the vital secrets of an art insistent on a poetics of non-work. Rayne cultivates the very moment that art engages thought, a singular experience within the delicate contradiction of art’s untamable potency. The scenes that constitute Carbon Days reiterate in shifting permutations the suspending effect of this engagement, dispropriating thought by way of artworks that seek to augment the urgent possibility of imagining a future.