Contrast II at Galeria Cozinha (FBAUP)
by Artur Leão
In the exhibition space there is an inherent circularity evoked by the book’s singular visual and graphic discourse as an object of narration and the visual narratives of the spreads which flood the walls of the Kitchen gallery at FBAUP. This strategy of overflowing spreads, understood as an extension of the nuclear object the book (Contrast II) meets Umberto Eco’s idea that books are not untouchable artefacts and that the possibility for underlining, personalizing and even going further, extending the book through other supports is of the utmost importance to mark its interest and further study. All this was explored in the exhibition space by allowing the spectator’s intervention not only with the large-scale spreads, but also in the book placed on a table, ready to be contaminated, weighed, and “scratched” by the observer. Even though we only noticed some fly-shaped stamp marks on the glass of the table where the books were disposed, nothing really happened that endangered the book/pages and spreads.
This relationship between the object and the subject within contemporary art, when explored, can counterbalance a certain lack of daring, as Mário Perniola says in Art & Its Shadow: “the experience of contemporary art can be interpreted as a transgression of boundaries (…) “. Within this context, the idealization of this book and its structure relied on a formal, rhizomatic discursiveness that evades the pages of the book and consequently the walls of the gallery. The astonishing diversity of images, some hermetic and cold in their process of closing, others more welcoming and revealing a significant psychological intimacy, are reorganized in the exhibition walls having as base the narrative logic of each author in the book, which also brings something new, and, in this sense, there is an understanding of the transgressive spirit that Perniola speaks of.
The connection between different projects is set up through the interaction of colours and patterns which inevitably fluctuate, just as some of the images ascend into the emptiness of the walls, apparently. See the bird in full flight, the lights of the incomplete buildings the aduncular clouds referring to the sleepy state of levitation.
THE UNIVERSE HAS GONE MUTE (text about the Contrast exhibition at CPF)
by Artur Leão
At a certain moment the torrent of images that daily fill our eyes is so great that their banalisation may lead to an incapacity to decipher their veiled messages, as well as the poetics of imagery. Sometimes deterring our ability to associate the representation of Man with other elements presented in the Cosmos.
Exhibition view:
A gaze of condemnation, covert, a revelation of an atrocious inner discomfort that resembles the Sun and the Moon. The distant earth as a liminal space, in harmony with what is intertwined with it, the fog, the sky, which hierogamy in full strength. A portrait of a girl covered in curls that smear her skin with drool, an almost scatological vision, in which her hair mimics the tangle of grass of the surrounding space. In the end threads of water crystallized in time, like a dilapidated lightning that supports the whole creation on a microscopic scale.
When the spectator tries to make a parallel between the representation of the human to the vast plane of other entities in the Universe, they approach not real experiences but ideas that shape: “It is evident that his life possesses a further dimension: it is not simply human, it is at the same time <<cosmic>>, since it has a trans-human structure.” (Mircea Eliade)
Contrast II at Casa das Artes
by Pedro Leão Neto
The exhibition has been communicating the photographic works of students and emerging authors carried out in the teaching context of the various institutions involved in this project, allowing simultaneously to hear the students explain their projects, as well as to observe their photographic works, whether in book format or on the online platform. The CONTRAST project aims to contribute to the dissemination, creation and teaching of photography in its interaction with Art, Architecture and Design. This contribution will be developed nationally and internationally through the sharing of experiences and knowledge between schools, non-academic groups and associations, bringing together the interest of different audiences for these themes in a transversal and holistic perspective.
