Daytime oven, although nocturnal – an itinerary
by Cristina Fernandes
[And these things, which live by decline, understand that you celebrate them; transitory, they trust us with the power of salvation, us, the most transitory of all.]
The first thing we see is a tyre on a rusted metal plinth. One might say it exploded, but the correct verb is “to split”. Pedro Paiva’s sculptures confuse us, materially and conceptually: the clay can look like clay, rubber, or softened metal (like meteors entering the atmosphere); and the simplest objects gain a magnetic force, a theatrical pose. Moving from literal titles – for example, the beautiful formulations “five bricks fallen from the sky” or “tile, head, brick” –, all the pieces tell suspended stories. They force us to stop and look back; to question the progress of the world through its slag.
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[All you perceive is a large coloured undulation, an iridescence, colours, a richness of colours. That is what a picture should give us first, a harmonious warmth, an abyss, into which the eye is plunged, a muted germination. A coloured state of grace. All these tints flow in your blood, don’t they? One feels reinvigorated. One is born into the real world.]
In Maria Capelo’s extensive work, the depiction of nature always exposes a tension. There is a systematic return to the same peaks, to the same woods, as if this repeated gesture could recompose an experience, decipher a mystery. Gazing at a mountain range on the horizon or watching a branch as it casts its shadow over our reclining limbs, we speak of breathing in the aura of those mountains or that branch. It is this vibration, this primitive joy of fire and wind, that we find in the ten forests of the large-format canvases that fill the first room. Colours have an unknown potency; they are the place where our brain and the universe meet. They cross reality and reach a more intimate and true point: the invisible currents that shape the landscape. The world seems to catch fire: greens, ochres, blues, oranges, pinks, yellows, reds, and blacks confront one another to illuminate a continuous process of permanence and transformation. Maria proceeds like a fearless researcher; in her hands, everything is matter, colour, and movement; everything is in motion. Not only the branches of the trees, but the earth itself and the sky race swiftly by: an unexpectedly cinematographic experience and a formidable raccord with the images of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. We witness a true clash of forces, but also a long-promised dialogue with Pedro Paiva’s sculptures. Three manhole covers resting on the floor and a fencer’s head on a plinth, arranged diagonally in the centre, create a line of complicity with the untidy landscapes. It is no longer just about pure geological processes; these clay remains mark the passage of man.
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[The landscape is a historical creation; it contains, engraved, all the marks of what happened, and, at the same time, everything is always in danger.]
No one would guess that these are the same landscapes. Against the chromatic exuberance and scale of the canvases, Maria Capelo counterposes dark, rugged drawings. Many of them look like stills from a documentary from the dawn of cinema; they demand proximity and sequence. Up close, we perceive that the earth is hard and poor – schist mountains covered in heather, rockrose, and low scrub, desolate paths where only an occasional slender eucalyptus survives. The shadow spreads, and the grooves of India ink on paper are like ancient wounds. Drawing ceases to be mere representation to become the very definition of the landscape. The images cluster together, forming geographical panoramas that, as we learned from the films of Huillet and Straub, allow us to probe beyond the obvious and unearth history, the memory inscribed in the earth. Space transforms into duration.
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[Grief disguised in landscapes that we cross without ever managing to reach.]
The drawings spread through the gallery in different ways. The largest ones surprise us, isolated or in pairs upon a wall – the definition of grace? In the dark room, they demand a more intimate attention; with a little effort, one can even see that mysterious interval between one image and another, the «in-between» where meaning is born. In the open spaces, alongside Pedro Paiva’s sculptures, they transform into tangible backdrops.
The clay pieces respond with a dense and intriguing presence. They hold the melancholy solemnity of someone who has survived their own ruin and no longer seeks anything. They are the debris of an unknown civilisation or, who knows, of our future. In front of the eighty drawings lined up, without frames, there are twisted and corroded tools (a vise, a crowbar,
a cogwheel, screws), a stereoscopic bird, four peaches, and an orange. Hanging on the wall, an oxidized tie and two masks: the reverse of the open-mouthed face is a face sticking its tongue out – matter plays tricks on us.
On the other side of the partition – playing with the perspective opened by the windows and framed by the building’s pillars, in total alignment with the memory of the old workshops of the Cooperativa dos Pedreiros –, four heads with sunken eyes open a deep rift in our perception. Between them, the hammer that tore the eyes open; in the background, nine almost square drawings with dark frames. Matter has its own rhythm; it hides and reveals more than one thinks. Here, are we standing before a court and an ancient crime? Who knows.
Throughout the exhibition, one realizes that, more than a dialogue, the relationship between Maria Capelo and Pedro Paiva is choreographic. And this is clearly shown on the small stage where drawings and artefacts present themselves to the public like characters in a performance that is simultaneously abstract and narrative. A remnant of a hanging tyre introduces a certain grotesque irony – as at the end of an unfinished play by Büchner.
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[This overflow of creation, which deposits its signs like shells upon the smooth wall of the statue, is an overflow of imagination: it is freedom, turning of the sun, flower knot, water curve, fork of the trees, one after the other. The techniques are mixed, the wood subtly imitates the fabric, and the fabric takes its motifs from earth. One real- izes that this creation has no limits, that everything communicates and that, from its planets to its atoms, this world of rigor comprises in its turn the world of beauty.]
The quote (written by Chris Marker for Les statues meurent aussi) describes, with extreme precision, the films by Maria Capelo and Pedro Paiva projected in the cave-room. They are two editing exercises that are like the notebooks of geographers or anthropologists. The first begins with the wind dragging a sheet of paper and ends with the wind in the trees (one of the basic principles of cinema). The second opens and closes with a smile. Both force us to observe the world with clean eyes.
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[And always this swelling of immensity within, this rising of floating memory. We think we find again, flying over the darkness, a place of yesteryear.]
The exhibition ends with the revolution of a wheel discreetly hanging on a wall (one must look for it, as it seems to be part of the building) and a buzzing-head, on a rusted metal plinth, facing a wall. The ear is a spiral.
– What burns inside the oven?
