EVA MENDES – Por acaso não é ocaso [1]. (ENG)

It is no coincidence that the sunset is discussed in this, which is the first major solo exhibition by Rui Calçada Bastos (Lisbon, 1971) at the Fernando Santos Gallery (Porto, Portugal). Determined by the evanescence of the sun as it falls below the horizon, it is a phenomenon that brings together time and light as velvety materials through the momentary recalibration of their extinction. However, it is as if the artist suggests that the group of more than forty works presented subsist only in the precise moment that precedes their realisation (darkness). Returning to a continuous reflection on painting and sculpture in his work, the exhibition perpetuates a devout intermezzo of ambiguity and wandering, the pause that precedes the destination and where all sides of the dice are blind.

Deprived of a narrative logic characterised by its linearity or constancy, the exhibition encompasses a set of internal dynamics that are recognisable depending on the decisions made while wandering through it—it is defined
by this quality and enhanced by it, as if it were a concealed repetition. There are units of images, groups that subtly recognise each other in a punctuating of oblique lines and poetic idiosyncrasies. Reflections of landscapes seem
to coexist between their most complex (romantic) form and their fearlessly simplified (minimal) version; human representations dissolve between the doubt of self-representation, the ghostly figure and the suggestion of an anthropomorphism reduced by the self-determination of nature. Similar to these paintings (to which we will return), the collection also includes a series of sculptural objects characterised by their profound enigmatic quality, using a recurring motif in the artist’s work—wooden suitcase tables—as a surface for his interventions. Often associated with travelling salesmen, these devices have four legs (usually irregular due to their fragility) that fold and retract, allowing them to be carried by a handle. Symbolically alluding to something ephemeral and transitory, the tables reveal the mutability of the reasoning developed about them in the image of a fleeting thought or rhetoric, reconstructed on the premeditation of the moment and open to equally disparate interpretations or understandings. Le parti pris des choses [2] announces this par excellence—the determination of objects or, similar to the play on words present in the exhibition’s title itself, the side that objects take. In fact, the influence that Ponge’s characteristic poetry of things has on Calçada Bastos’s plastic understanding is well known. Like Ponge, the artist seeks to unfold himself in the search for le mot juste.

Confronting some of the artist’s most pressing concerns, the pictorial variations expand according to rhythms and setbacks particular to their silence and meditative presence. Focusing on a visual trend simultaneously allied to 19th-century aesthetics (in fact, repeatedly referenced) and the American avant-garde of the second half of the last century, the artist’s paintings demonstrate a predisposition for themes close to misanthropy as a place of dissociation, emptiness and contemplation. From trees that fortify themselves after burning (as in Pirófito [Pyrophytic]) to landscapes that retreat into their own impossibility (Por esta estrada não se chega ao mar [This road does not lead to the sea]), constant and distinct dichotomies follow one another in the works which, despite the phenomenon of contradiction, intermingle. Dualities such as joy and melancholy (as in the example mentioned above) are slowly cradled by feelings of closeness and escape (in Ocaso [sunset] and A Reason III, respectively), as well as the luminous and dystopian serenity of Liberty Av., Vista Pacífica [Pacific View] or the Montes [Mountains] series contrasts, summoning the inert and suffocating violence
of This blunt axe (a blunt and distressing blade) and I can’t breath (a sphinx without a nose), both images of a poetic dismemberment associated with a powerless will. Alongside the alienation they appear to witness, however, there are

peers who recall these images to a state of absolute consciousness and sedimentation—perplexed but present beings who observe the entire scene with the uncompromising attention of an infinite sleep. Some of them (beings) refer to the artist himself in older, performance-based works (Both of us emerges from Quadrifoglio [2000] and Video Still Painting from Same Old Tune [2005]), others fabricating misanthropes absorbed by the surrounding phenomenological exaltation.

Placid despite its turmoil, the exhibition conveys a quiet mood provided by the sharp entry of drawings and sculptures external to the pictorial work. Catalysed precisely by their repetition, displacement and recurrence in the paintings, the references reproduced in the sculptural objects are freed from a supposed intellectual understanding
and become reasons for the development of sculpture and painting themselves; they are determined as markers for the opening of a place that signals the relationship between the artist and the image and, more importantly, relegate the place of surprise to that same space. It is possible to witness this movement in the set of six works in Le parti pris des choses when traces of everyday objects intertwine with clues to an archival, mnemonic and very personal universe (i.e.
an axe blade on the table leg with the drawing of the hanged man’s vineyard; the slat supporting the reproduction of
a peach tree; the very Tarkovskian dynamic between the body and the machine on the writing paper leaning over the tabletop relegated to a woman’s body; or the visual reproduction of the table handle itself, removed and repositioned next to its outline). Also next to This Blunt Axe, we find a tree trunk, rough and sturdy, pierced with dozens of rusty nails on its cut surface, as if seduced by the provocation of the blunt blade that confronts it next to a tree covered with eyes. Like a prolonged echo, there is also a set of twenty-two works on paper, drawings whose gestures seem to migrate from the whitish table tops and rest on the walls that enclose the exhibition. In them, we see the position of various artists in their studios. Or, perhaps, the determination with which each one walks in the world.

[1] It literally translates to “Actually, the sun isn’t setting”. In Portuguese, however, a play of words is alluded due to the phonetic familiarity of both words, actually/ chance (acaso) and sunset (ocaso).

[2] Title of the homonymous work by Francis Ponge, 1942.