Transit and traffic. Life in art.
by Miguel Von Hafe Pérez

In the context of the history of modern art, there are many examples of expanded portraits of social experiences that are incorporated into the work of the artists in such a way that a certain reality comes across as a totalizing truth, at least in those recurrent and referential elements that build up a specific visual universe: from the Impressionist’s idle promenades and Sunday picnics to the electrifying frenzy of the Berlin nights of the Neue Sachlichkeit, from Walker Evans photographs of the American Great Depression to Nan Goldin’s queer intimacy, from the segregated society portrayed by David Goldblatt to Paulo Nozolino’s disintegrating and oblivious Europe.
Even if it’s not an ethical requirement, immersion in a given context can result in a privileged exercise of observation. Notwithstanding, being close to the temporality that is specific to any given place, to its sounds, its odours, interpersonal dynamics, to its idiosyncratic rules and codes ends up shaping how we can analyse and transform its living matter. In these cases, artistic creation is bound by truth. The distance from the observed is materialized in the unnecessariness of the documental.
In 2008, when Mauro Cerqueira and André Sousa opened their space in Rua dos Caldeireiros, in Porto’s historical centre, the street was still a small road populated by failing businesses and industries, decrepit houses sheltering a fragile and aging community.
A Certain Lack of Coherence (the space’s name) was never a disruptive element introduced by an intellectual or artistic elite imposing itself into a dilapidated local reality, but rather knew how to use the specific circumstances of both its place and space to create a plan that structured a coexistence. The fact that Mauro Cerqueira decided to move in and set up his studio on the same street only reinforced this sense of community.
Those who, like me, only occasionally wandered through Caldeireiros, might recall how, in the late 1990s, during the not so discreet heroin boom, junkies would walk down (light-footed) and up (at cost) this steep street. It was a gripping image: dematerialized spectres coexisting with growing economic and social squalor. Nonetheless, the community kept surviving, centennial businesses resisted, many would flock there searching for the gastronomic delicacies served in Adega Vila Meã, a monument to good traditional Portuguese food.
Mauro Cerqueira got acquainted with many local characters and realized how the community was being transformed. Based on his experiences and on the stories he was told, he started building a visual narrative that energetically condenses a way of being in time that lacks the capacity for transformation. Neither he nor his neighbours, neither his friends nor anyone else could have imagined what was to happen in the years to come. If the overwhelming gentrification of this area is not complete, we owe it solely to the incredible stubbornness of some of its inhabitants, of those (now fewer) spectres that still move up and down the street, and to the stench of piss (now a cosmopolitan piss, one should say) pooling in the narrowest of the side streets and alleys.
Mauro told me that he now finds it difficult to get out of his place without being captured by some smartphone camera. I witness the phenomenon myself, as I waited outside after ringing his bell and a group of tourists started photographing the street compulsively. Inadvertently, I became part of the scenery.
City – scenery, that’s it. That’s the worst that can happen to a city like ours. Looking around, we can see how many buildings have been gutted and emptied of all its contents, leaving just a façade that is filled out with tonnes of plasterboard and Ikea paraphernalia.
I have no moralistic pretensions. The phenomenon’s inevitability is consensual, even
if how we react to it may be the subject of heated debate. Mauro Cerqueira does not claim a higher intellectual, ethical or moral ground when compared to those he refers to and works with. He takes note. He (sometimes) gives voice. But, overall, he breaks through the still too complacent and conservative context of Portuguese plastic arts with free-spirited and disruptive energy.
At the heart of the exhibition that he is now presenting, a series of large format works refer to the great tradition of the abstract painting of the second half of the 20th century. From far away, on the immaculate white of the gallery walls – which in this new space gains a kind of para-institutional aura – we see works that reveal dark circular, winding geometrical shapes. As we walk towards the work, it dawns on us that the background is not a canvas, but rather a mirror. In many of those pieces, objects were applied on the mirroring surface: metal grids, sea shells and mobile phone parts. Surprisingly, the black surfaces are not produced with paint, but drawn with burnt wax.
The antithesis of light: black, reiterated as the remnant of some bygone white, burnt and abandoned in a claustrophobic, damp and filthy corner. Riding the Great Dragon, the metaphysics of addiction. But it is also the white wax of votive candles: the metaphysics of belief. Intriguing, the Chapel of Nossa Senhora da Silva in Caldeireiros is in itself
a representation of the observant belief of those who navigate the street in their opiate journeys. These pieces are held together by these extremes. Spiritual transit and material traffic. The mirror is a white surface for the vanity of others, a witness of this strange and ambiguous zigzagging. I can’t help but imagine the hundreds of selfies that will be taken in front of these pieces. Narcissus, not on a mirror but taken by a vertigo that, more or less timidly, tries to submerge as the reified image of the spectator that discovers
a perfect balance between the filth of art and the addictive glow of the mirror.
As I mentioned earlier, the artist manipulates the spectator’s subliminal appetite for the beautiful form, and their consequent descent into the roughness of the transfigured real. A world somewhere between Fifth Avenue and Rua dos Caldeireiros. Bravo.
Even so, Mauro Cerqueira proposes much broader references and appropriations in this Desenganar [the title of the show, which roughly translates into something between to undeceive and to disillusion]. Including materials he brought from his experience at the Rauschenberg residency, in Captiva, Florida, in 2013, and memorabilia pertaining to juvenile references, such as black metal bands like the Dark Funeral; what prevails in the show is the idea of memory as the origin of a formally and socially unruly territory which uses the real as the anchor for neorealist perceptual landslides.
Yes, down and dirty: brutti, sporchi e cattivi, we welcome it. And what about this historical context that attempts to remove these people from view? Isn’t it even lower, even dirtier? Whenever we gaze upon something, we are editing reality. Looking upon the world beyond the limits of its stability, we critically expand our capacity to think and act.
That is what Mauro Cerqueira asks us to do. What more could we ask of art?