Travesía Cuatro is pleased to announce the opening of A Third Reason, a solo exhibition by Alexandre Estrela at Rialto6, in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, September 15, at 9.30PM.
Shielding the book from the harms of human erosion, the dust-jacket of The Writing of Stones, 1970, shows a slice of marble from Roger Caillois' surrealist stone collection. This Tuscan wonder, known as ‘Ruin Marble’ or ‘Pietra Paesina’, has a pattern that resembles a deserted landscape with a horizon of strange and ruinous shapes. Sharing the same morphology of trees or ruins, these pseudo-fossils are the result of mineral reactions that occur in the diagenesis of the stone.
For the piece Ruin Marble, a suchlike stone from Estrela’s bibelot collection, was photographed in different degrees of zoom that unveil its microscopic details. Slices of these photographs are randomly brought to the foreground by an algorithm and the dramatic drumming sound of Gabriel Ferrandini....The images move horizontally as slow tectonic plates that create an unpredictable scenario, a small surrealist theatre projected on a stone-shaped screen.
Inside another book sits a narrow image of Jorge Luis Borges in front of a bookcase. Like the protagonist of The Library of Babel, who predicts his body will erode by the “fall, which shall be infinite”, the video installation A Third Reason, also condemns the image of the writer to an infinite fall. His way down is dictated by the voice of Genesis P-Orridge reciting an infinite poem, in the same line of the computer generated experiments written in the sixties by GP-O’s mentor, Brion Gysin.
This animation of the falling Borges and his shelf is projected over an image of the sedimented remains of a hand-made mirror. The AI machine-made-mantra unleashes, in a frantic speed, strolling lights and geometric patterns in infinite variations, a poetic stream that would hypothetically fill the shelves of Borges’ Babylonian Library. The eternal scroll is full of hidden meanings and acts as a dream machine that massages the brain and the senses to split the ego from consciousness.
While the piece Ruin Marble follows the tradition of Chinese meditation stones, A Third Reason works as a soothsaying oracle. Both pieces presented in the exhibition at Rialto6 function as horizontal and vertical axis for a third poetic way, a poetic third way, a way poetic third.
With the poetic and technical support of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, GP-Orridge, Jorge Luís Borges, Borja Caro, Ana Baliza, AI beta-bot, Gonçalo Raposo (Human Language and Technology Laboratory-INESC:ID), Roger Caillois, Gabriel Ferrandini, Gonçalo Barreiros, André Cepeda, Pedro Canoilas, Luís Pavão, António Rijo de Carvalho and Gráfica Maiadouro.
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The work of Alexandre Estrela (Lisbon, 1971) is an investigation on the essence of images that expands spatially and temporally through different supports. In his videos and installations Estrela examines the subject’s psychological reactions to images in their interaction with matter. Each piece has several layers to which we are initiated step by step. The works are not just there to be watched, but rather to be unfolded. Each piece convokes synesthetic experiences, visual and sound illusions, aural and chromatic sensations that function as perceptive traps, leading the subject towards conceptual levels. With this strategy Estrela is constantly problematising the elements that constitute the act of perceiving, splitting vision into further sensible dimensions towards the unseen and the unheard.
Selected solo exhibitions include All and Everything, Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, 2020; Um Mês Acordado, curated by Gerard Faggionato at Indipendenza, Rome, 2019; All and Everything, Den Frie, Copenhagen, 2019; Volta Grande, curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas at Pivô, 2019, São Paulo; Métal Hurlant, curated by Sérgio Mah at Fondation Gulbenkian, Paris, 2019; Lua Cão (with João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva), a project initiated in 2017 by Galeria Zé Dos Bois in Lisbon, that traveled to the Kunstverein München, and concluded at La Casa Encendida in Madrid in January 2019; Knife in the Water, 2018, at Travesía Cuatro, Madrid; Ouro Mouro, 2018, at the Quetzal Art Centre, Vidigueira, Portugal; Baklite, 2017, at CAV Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra, Portugal; Cápsulas de silencio, 2016, within the Fisuras Program, at the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid; Roda Lume, 2016, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Antwerp, M HKA, Belgium; Meio Concreto, 2013, at Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal; Um homem entre quatro paredes, 2013, at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; The Sunspot Circle, 2013, at The Flat Time House, London, United Kingdom, among others.
The artist has also participated in numerous group shows in institutions and biennales such as: Points de rencontres, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019; Anozero – Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra, 2017, curated by Luíza Teixeira da Freitas; L’Exposition d’un Rêve, 2017, at Gulbenkian Foundation Paris, ACMI Melbourne and TATE Modern, a project by Mathieu Copeland; Hallucinations, Documenta 14, 2017, Athens, a festival curated by Ben Russel, etc.
His work is included in the following international collections: Fundación Museo de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain); Colección Inelcom (Spain); Museo Rufino Tamayo (Mexico); Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal); Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea — Museu do Chiado (Portugal); Fundação Telecom (Portugal); Fundação Serralves (Portugal); António Cachola Collection (Portugal); MAAT — Museum of Art Technology and Architecture (Portugal); Taguchi Art Collection (Japan), Fundación CALOSA, Irapuato, Guanajuato, (Mexico); Collection Centre Pompidou (France); Coleçao Teixeira de Freitas (Portugal); Collection du Frac Bretagne (France); Collection of Maria João and Armando Cabral (Portugal), among others.
From 2007 until 2021, Alexandre Estrela was the director and co-programmer with Ana Baliza of a non-profit art venue in Lisbon called Oporto.
Entrada actualizada el el 22 may de 2023
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