Education by stone
by Luís Quintais

José Pedro Croft is an artist particularly heightened to the notion of place. His work is an art form of a memory that intends to highlight the identity of the spaces where he exhibits or inscribes his objects, suggesting a continuity of processes that also revisit ways of doing things and concerns that belonged to others who preceded him.
What is, perhaps, fundamental to defend in this context, is how the artist articulates the formal rigor of the minimalists with a certain expressive intensity, that seems to permanently jeopardize the idea of form, or the purity of form, promising it to deconstruction, and even emptiness.
If his art is one of memory, it could be said that, at the same time, it tries to reconsider the creative principle that lies at the beginning and that exceeds the acquisitions of memory, affirming, after all, that each artist has the responsibility to create the world anew in a primary and genesis act. This first act requires us to consider the making-in-process that art clarifies.
Croft recognizes the transitory and impermanent dimension of the artistic gesture or, if you will, he is fully aware of how impossible it is to deter meaning or how to fix it definitively. Artistic objects are, after all, indices of a process that never ceases. The unfolding of his work is evidence that, while giving us an almost forensic notion of his journey, redefines the terms of each beginning, as if the expectation of the first invention was never abandoned or compromised.
Cooperativa dos Pedreiros’ old workshop space reverberates a dense memory, as if it were activated materialities that we don’t know the name of. It’s up to the artist to mobilize the dream of matter, to search for that name. And so it is, when we walk through this space, chasing the lived sense of what lies in a region we inappropriately call the past. (And we call on William Faulkner when he writes in Requiem for a Nun that the past is never dead, that, strictly speaking, it isn’t even past(1).)
Visiting Galeria Nuno Centeno these days will only mean coming face to face with the canyon through which the plurality of times flows with the fury of a river that thought it had been forgotten. Nothing is forgotten, after all. Everything can be found again.
José Pedro Croft thus joins the history of those who preceded him, who are also the stonemasons in his demiurgy. This story is the celebration of a common surrender to the material precipices that the sculptor recognizes as his own. (It would be important to recall here the importance of working with stone and the figure of João Cutileiro in his initial training as a sculptor). The stone is of incalculable value to Croft because it is a metaphor and metonymy for forces that go beyond biography and that unite the artist’s journey with a certain idea of duration that exceeds individual life but which, paradoxically, can only be activated by circumstance and the virtuosity of the maker, in short, the maker who carefully mobilizes his personal history in that making.
Struggling with the substance of time and matter is certainly one of the artist’s great aims in his multiplicity of registers and media, the fundamental axes of which are sculpture, engraving, and drawing. Croft seems particularly concerned with an art that confronts the nature of time, and in this area, the materiality of which the world is made is one of the gateways to the nature of time. To manipulate matter, to train it, is to conquer time, to make it visible in its thickness and subtle shades. More than representing, it is necessary to reveal the material from which time is made, with all the conscious and unconscious modulations that seem to color human experience, which, through the artist – through his body and his movement – gain a meaning that we could aptly describe as universal because it summons and challenges us all.
For Croft, it could be said that thought and extension are attributes of a movement that includes us. It is a phenomenology in which the time of life resembles a shadow that spills over matter and tints it with its impermanence. Immersed in the river of time, we recognize ourselves in its objects as if they were pieces torn from that flow.
The exhibition at Galeria Nuno Centeno is itself a suspension in this territory in flux. From room to room, we are confronted with a series of unfoldings that are, if you will, a reduced model of Croft’s work. Drawings, diptychs, sculptures. Various dimensions, subtle chromaticities, different material inscriptions guide the lived space of creation, assuming the materiality of the place, taking it as their own, unbalancing it, asymmetrizing it, shifting our attention to what there is of interruption, emptiness, consciousness and dream.
To a large extent, Croft shows us how, in a phenomenology of objects, everything that is relevant is situated within their limits. It could be said that weighing up these limits is also one of his purposes, as it was, in a different way, for Donald Judd, one of the most influential and favorite minimalists(2).
The existence of a grammar of forms (the importance of the circle in his work should be emphasized) is only a first moment here, a typological desire that soon falls apart.
We move seamlessly into a domain that seems to compromise all formal exercises or principles, and we recognize, in a kind of assent that doesn’t dissipate, the fundamental density that runs through our experience. Color is not something we see, but something we immerse ourselves in. Space is not a prior metrification, but a projection of what we experience. The body – with the tactile and mobile impressions that guide it – is expressively allied to the temporalities of matter. We recognize a circle, for example, but that circle is interrupted: it is, after all, an opening, a declination of the void that contemplates us. The artist could tell us that there is no form prior to the sovereign intuitions of life.

February of 2024

 (1) Faulkner, William 1994 (1950) Requiem for a nun, act I, scene III, in Novels 1942-1945, New York, The library of America, p. 535.

(2) Donald Judd 1964 Specific objects, in Donald Judd Writings, 2016, New York, Judd Foundation & David Zwirner Books, pp. 134-159.