Sculpture as incision
Over recent decades the Portuguese visual arts scene has been relatively unfavourable to sculpture, if we think of sculpture as being anchored in a specific disciplinary tradition, rather than in its expanded versions, in particular what is now vaguely called "installation".
Many of the misunderstandings that traverse the world of contemporary art persist in the field of sculpture, in the wake of a slew of pseudo-modern premises that have engendered a countless number of monoliths (used above all to "embellish" the roundabouts that have been indiscriminately created by pro-active mayors).
Renovation of the language of sculpture has involved methodologies that have been driven, on the one hand, by impetuses towards dematerialisation, and on the other by interaction with the host exhibition space, in terms of integration/questioning of the pre-existing architecture.
Isaque Pinheiro is a sculptor. His entire plastic thinking is based on handling, modelling, carving and assembling materials. His body is...a body measured by means of the height and weight of materials, his intuition and creative inspiration are shaped by the weight of his predecessors and contemporaries who have defined the parameters of a discipline that at best persists as a coveted form of inevitability. It is nonetheless curious that in the jargon of art history there has been endless reference to the putative "end of painting", while sculpture has perhaps been the artistic field that experienced the most tense formal and conceptual reformulations during the second half of the twentieth century. In Michael Fried's famous essay Art and Objecthood, of seminal importance in the structuring divisions of artistic thought during the 1960s, his arguments were primarily rooted in the field of sculpture (Caro vs. the minimalists) - e.g. "presentness" vs. theatricality and literalism).
In this context it is perhaps odd that one of the contemporary epicentres of the questioning of the status of the image, and of art in general, has been precisely the idea of the monument, which is now endless scrutinised by young artists who often think that the mere junction of an archive image of any modern event (sculptural or architectural) with any display device (e.g. a table / slide set / painting on top, etc., etc.) endows it with an air of documentary research, so highly appreciated by Biennials. In contrast, we can consider the incisive and hypercritical debate that an artist such as Thomas Schütte maintains with the discipline of sculpture, related to the context of the reception of the idea of a monument, with contemporary history and, basically, with its ghosts - which are our own - to understand what we are talking about: the froth of time or of art.
Isaque Pinheiro is a sculptor then. For the Travessa da Ermida - a desacralised space that nowadays functions as an exhibition centre - he has proposed a sculpture that I'm almost certain will become a key point of reflection in the myriad range of contemporary Portuguese sculptures. It's as simple as that. Because there are times when we encounter sculptures that we know can no longer elude our innermost being. However pleasant, disturbing, disgusting, or empathic they may be. They persist.
The art of throwing / dialogue with the walls. The title of the work discussed herein, is an unlikely composition. An unfinished, classicist architectural fragment lies on the floor of this former place of worship, enveloped in what at first seems to be a rubber device used to launch missiles against an enemy. The obvious image is that of a catapult. We sense the ductile nature of the black element surrounding the fragment of pink column. We sense the weight of the material, and we calculate the enormous energy that this retractable element would require in order to launch its missile.
However, upon careful observation (or when we touch it), we realize that it's actually made of iron, an impossibility incorporated into a probable image. The space, confronted with this threatening presence, becomes oppressive, claustrophobic. We traverse several periods of time in a receptive atemporality: classical antiquity, when such weapons were first invented; the architectural grammar of the fragment of marble; aesthetic romanticism, associated to a classic fragment, the ruin; contemporaneity in the manner in which the space is transmuted from the artistic occupation; and, above all, the immediate present, in the reverberation of a continuous sound of a pickaxe in an ethereal construction site.
Fabrication and the potentiality of being. A performance-based sculpture in terms of that which conjures up its tensive state. Because space and time collide therein, in a filament of the constructed possible; not in the surreal sequel, but rather in the nonimplementation of the foreseeable. In this case the sense of absurdity doesn't derive from an objective random event, but instead from a calculated and structured plane of collision. We are caught between that which we perceptibly withdraw from our gaze, from materials that we thought had been stabilized, and the sudden realisation that, as a result of our inversion of expectations, we question our inescapable need to interpret things in function of the comfort of the familiar.
Although Isaque Pinheiro has been classified as a sculptor, this sculpture is perhaps one of the most complex devices that he has ever crafted, precisely because it responds to a very specific commission, for a very particular space. In effect, it is an outgrowth of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk - a moment of intrinsic union of various techniques and meanings. Given the tremendous energy of a work that persists beyond the circumstances underlying its creation, it implies various different moments in time, as mentioned above, and harbours more or less cultivated and profound, or immediate and carefree perceptions - I imagine delirious children enjoying the sculpture, while more educated persons will recall their acquired knowledge.
In 1969 the conceptual artist, Douglas Huebler, proposed that we shouldn't add any more objects to the world, in a provocative and premonitory relationship with the widespread, irresponsible and mediocre creation of "works of art" that occupy excessive space in houses, waiting to be thrown away, or the reserves of museums that are incompatible with so many cubic metres of "unwanted" space. We therefore constantly ask ourselves, with the utmost discernment: was it all worth it? In this case, at this moment in time, I say: yes. Thank you, Isaque.
Miguel von Hafe Pérez
Entrada actualizada el el 04 ene de 2017
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