I do not remember the first time I looked at the sky
Nuno Sousa. 13 May – 31 August 2021*
The exhibition has a central piece of 14 graphite drawings on large-format paper belonging to the Linha Funda series, which was created by the Portuguese artist from cartographic cliches from the second half of the century XIX. The series represents an approach to the sky playing with the dichotomy at when we observe the sky and concepts such as science and spirituality come together to show concepts such as light, darkness, closeness or distance.
Also about temperature and light, absence and presence is the installation “Expandir la reality”, in which five water-repellent DM radiators, with their corresponding tubes and electrical connections, dialogue oriented towards the works inviting us to see that other invisible dimension that is the that gives us the perception of the moments according to the environment that surrounds us.
The exhibition is completed with the piece “Para Não Ficarmos Sujeitos a Um Exteriror Qualquer” made up of 15 wooden shutters that, hanging on the wall, in another room, play with the space inside and outside: “the piece is a border area between the interior and exterior “, explains the artist.
I do not remember the first time I looked at the sky, and quite probably I will not remember the last one. I stand, right now, somewhere in the interval between the two, trying to find a new posture in order to define a new angle of view, this new relationship I seek to establish with what is above me: instead of continuing to use the point of view with which I have been working so far, which made me speculatively search for an extraterrestrial vantage point to observe our planet, I now reverse my position. With my feet firmly grounded on our planet, I attempt to identify and recognise the viewpoint from which I had carried out all my previous observations. To look at the sky is to dramatically foreshorten the diversity of inhabitants of the visual field and, even though the figure-ground relationship appears extremely clear, that is not, however, sufficient to clarify any understanding that does not present itself as infinite. To this empty ‘background,’ or more properly, to this observation without a background, it is possible to add clouds, stars that relationally and tendentially occupy the same position and that we can only see and experience after nightfall. We can also observe the earth’s natural satellite, the moon, and the more knowledgeable will be able to identify three galaxies. These elements that inhabit this place provide us with a dialectic between perenniality and volatility, between the finite that lies in the feet and the infinite that takes over the eyes. Briefly, this flight of the eye brings into question the condition of the perspectival observer.
Nuno Sousa Vieira
Translation: José Gabriel Flores