Rui Calçada Bastos’s practice frequently involves biographical elements, ranging from personal relationships to emotional states associated with people, places, and objects encountered by the artist. In his videos, photographs, and sculptures, he develops poetic narratives that offer a melancholic vision of the world. In “Avalon,” his first solo show at this gallery, seven recent works […]
Quatro fotografias de “atelier”, duas fotografias de exterior, uns banais ténis sobre o chão, uma escultura e um vídeo compõem as peças em exposição na Galeria Pedro Oliveira. A escultura (dois casacos, na manga dos quais se enfia uma lâmpada com braço comum) dá o nome à exposição segundo um pretexto romântico e reflexivo (“Loneliness […]
Foreword Rui Calçada Bastos is a nomad. Thus, travel, dislocation, homelessness and a lack of sense of belonging are prominent issues in his work. To a certain extend this is also echoed in his visual language. In fact, it is the remarkable coherence of formal, visual qualities and the content and subject matter that make […]
Rui Calçada Bastos’ piece Ten Years Looking Forward To See You from 1999 consists of two video projections facing one another. On both walls people of different ages, sexes and from varied ethnic groups can be seen looking into the camera. For this, he used video material taken over almost a decade. During this period […]
Me, Myself and I Diogo Lopes Clichés may only surface to existence given their anchorage to a pervasive universal truth, rarefied yet nevertheless factual. As far as art is concerned, to label it as a vessel for the manifestation of subjectivity seems to be nothing short of a tautological display. If this is indeed its […]
Few artists are able to reduce video to its essential means of expression. Rui Calçada Bastos goes further, using video and its possibilities in a similar way to pencil drawing. With a minimum of technical effects he creates a lively iconography, which does not simply unfold itself on the screen, but uses the screen as […]
Imagine a story about a man replete with images, sometimes sounds. This man – an individual without qualities – would feed on an endless yet parcimoniously digested flow of images. This man would merely exits through the look of others, defining himself through the others’ probing gaze. On the images, which would – in a […]