Ana Anacleto – Ideas and annotations, or a proposal for a reflection based on Unsettling Affairs (ENG)

Unsettling Affairs is Rui Calçada Bastos’ largest solo show in the Portuguese context to date. Its anthological typology brings together a set works from his latest production alongside a selection of pre-existing ones.  

The show borrows the title of a new work, of a performative nature, which takes over the entirety of one of the gallery’s four rooms and is intended as a moment of reflection on disciplinarily distinct works sharing a range of concerns around disquiet and its manifestations. The theme is central to the artist’s creative universe, which results to a large extent from a process that is firmly based on the subject and an eminently empirical relationship with its externality.

In the first gallery, faithfull to his fascination with everyday life and its usually invisible events and incidents, which take place in the urban context where the artist circulates or roams, Bastos presents a set of large scale photographic images (part of the series Untitled, which he has been developing since 2016), whose diaristic character reinforces the obsession and infinite curiosity denoted by his gaze.

The relationship between these images and sculptural works (with more of an installation quality to them) is especially pertinent. In the studio, the experience of the encounter between the drifting gaze and external randomness and incident results in sets of three-dimensional forms which put to the test improbable relations and, in the subsequent exhibition context, propose to the viewer a strangely familiar dialogue with the two-dimensional printed images.  

By recovering and echoing both the tradition of minimalist sculpture and the Dadaist appropriation of found objects, the works generate moments of tension that bring to the fore issues commonly associated with our relationship to sculpture, i.e., weight, balance, matter, body, motionlessness or dynamism.

Across the following rooms, we encounter a set of works formally distinct from the previous one,  but whose presence indelibly takes on the same diaristic tone, the same obsessive character, the same attention of the gaze. Perhaps it could be said that by being closer to drawing in their expanded component – in a significant number of works the collage of found papers takes centre stage – these pieces once more echo the idea of drift, errancy, distance and travel, accentuating the significance of memory as an access tool to an absent context. Through the direct reference to the letter as an object of communication – which stresses distance while allowing access to memory and stimulating the imagination – we recognize the presence of an idea of continuous dislocation, of distancing and absence, an understanding of traveling as a process of both cognition and uprooting that searches for Otherness through an idealized construction.

The theme of disquiet that we mentioned earlier is particularly felt in the performance  Unsettling Affairs (2019) – a work choreographed for two interpreters – in which the search for an encounter and the establishment of a trajectory of communication is constantly frustrated by an inadequacy of the communicational apparatus itself. The physical presence of the two bodies in motion, and the sound produced by the dislocation of the objects over the plane of the floor, contaminate the entire space and reinforce the highly tensioned presence of the works featured in the next room. There, we find the sculpture Conflicto Interno [InternalConflict] (2017) which, as it dialogues with the series of photogravures Paisagem para Desaparecidos II [Landscape for the Vanished II] (2019), points to the materiality that may underly our immaterial relationship with memory.

As we know, the fact that experiences influence behaviour illuminates the existence of the function of recollecting, with memory as outcome of perception, attention and learning but, at the same time, as an enormous influence on these processes. For Aristotle memory was the subject’s ability to keep in mind a given perceptual experience as well as the ability to distinguish between an internal “appearance” and its occurrence in the past. Which is to say: we speak of a mental image built from a given perceptual experience which can be recovered (more or less consciously) whenever the necessity for it arises. We resort to memory to be able to recall. To be able to see again. To be able to be again.

Having had the chance to observe closely the oeuvre of  Rui Calçada Bastos, his modusoperandi, his decisions and hesitations, his surprising way of incorporating the random and the fortuitous into his work, his making, unmaking and remaking, it could be said that his is a deliberate and voluntary relationship with memory, leading to the construction (in the present) of plastic situations ensuing from previous perceptual experiences (located in the past), which consequently feed the perceptual experiences to come (in the future).

It could be said that few acknowledge the legacy of Romanticism like he does, which allows him to embrace conceptual methodologies based on the subject and its experiences, and on the valuing of subjectivity, such as the manifestations of emotion and intuition, as gateways into the world. To a large extent, the unavoidable line of continuity that is recognizable in his trajectory  – marked by coherence and cohesion that owe much to the profoundly intimate relationship that the artist establishes between himself and his work – is contingent precisely upon this game. 

Ana Anacleto

January 2020