Exhibition: COSMO/POLITICS #2: Conflict and Unity
Artists: João Ferro Martins, Mafalda Santos and Susana Gaudêncio
Museum of Neorealism
Dates: 2018-05-26 – 2018-11-11
Curatorship: Sandra Vieira Jürgens and Paula Loura Batista
Continuing the COSMO/POLITICS contemporary art exhibition cycle and following the matrix that guides the project (establishing a dialogue with the neorealist legacy), the starting point for this second exhibition is the conference entitled Conflict and Unity of Contemporary Art, given by Mário Dionísio at the National Society of Fine Arts in December 1957, and published in 1958. At this conference, which was part of the 1st Gulbenkian Foundation Fine Arts Exhibition, Mário Dionísio questions participants about crucial and pressing issues concerning art and modern aesthetic creation, regarding what he considered a false antagonism between abstractionism and realism, or form and content, and about the conflict between art and the public.
Surprising as it may seem, 60 years later, some of the questions raised by Mario Dionísio remain fully relevant. In this context, we brought together a number of issues related to contemporary artistic creation in a dialogue we hardly consider anachronistic when we realise the timelessness and importance of reviving the critical thinking about artistic practices and their impact on society at the Neorealism Museum.
We invited the three artists (João Ferro Martins, Mafalda Santos and Susana Gaudêncio) to follow up this debate shared in time and to reflect on and discuss different ways of representing reality, the social function of art, the topicality of the notion of "useful art" and the acceptance of art in society, or the continuous agreements and disagreements between the public and contemporary art.
JOÃO FERRO MARTINS
In the series Conflict and Unity, comprising three sculptural works, João Ferro Martins addresses the theme of the exhibition based on the notion of replication and the conflict between aesthetic discourses arising from similar objects. The issue of the tensions experienced by modern artists, namely the antinomic relations between abstract and figurative art, between the value of utility versus the value of autonomy of the artistic object, or between authored and anonymous work, are explored in the creation of this sculptural triptych based on a matrix: a utilitarian museum object used to transport works of art in the Neorealism Museum itself. Using the structure of the lower platform of this vehicle, designed, built and used by the technical team of the Neorealism Museum, João Ferro Martins built his artistic project in collaboration with the employees of the municipal woodwork workshops. This reference to the way the project is built is relevant because it evokes a critique to the concept of artistic authorship inherent to the series, by means of the partial copy of a functional object, and emphasizes the recognition of ordinary workshop work, often accomplished thanks to the support of anonymous people. More than promoting an aesthetic experience, Conflict and Unity is primarily focused on addressing the way a work of art is produced and the creative processes intrinsic to the author.
Conflict and Unity I, which comprises a small wheeled platform on which there is an amplifier and two speakers, acquires the status of an ordinary stereo system and sound installation, reflecting the richness of the appropriation of objects from everyday life and the collaborative potential of the different artistic disciplines. Next to it we find Conflict and Unity II, which brings us closer to the value of the autonomy of minimalist aesthetics, thanks to its monolithic appearance, which is nevertheless subverted by the deliberate presence of a light element. On the other hand, Conflict and Unity III, whose appearance is similar to that of the other two works, is made of plywood and has an apparently utilitarian function, due to the presence of a set of two types of glasses, in an unstable equilibrium and with different values in terms of aesthetics and usefulness: a common glass (popular, mainly used for wine) and a refined glass (a flute, used for champagne).
MAFALDA SANTOS
The materiality and visibility of objects and the way their form and content are perceived are some of the starting points of the Anhangabaú (2014) installation, by Mafalda Santos. The installation shows us a "wall" built of overlapping piles of printed paper. The information contained in these pages, if any, remains inaccessible and encrypted, as we can only see their multiple and varied margins.
Playing with the concept of abstraction in order to question the content's infinite possibilities, and also with the object's physical or three-dimensional nature and the image's two-dimensional and abstract nature, Mafalda Santos raises other reflections and questions of interest to the reading of her work, such as the accumulation and obsolescence inherent to the excess of information that, paradoxically, make it impossible to access knowledge. In the vortex of our time, when both reliable and fake information travels fast, this work leads us to reflect on the real conflict between the exponential amount of information we receive and the actual knowledge generated by this transmission, which is as immediate as it is ephemeral or superficial. By re-appropriating it and re-reading it through Mario Dionísio's critical production, the formal character of the work that intervenes "architecturally" in the exhibition space, creating a visual barrier that conceals the works on display, does not deny its strongly abstract nature, whose reading and access will be that much deeper as we get closer to its inexhaustible world of possibilities.
The artist is also presenting the work Force and Form (2018), which reflects the theme of the conference Conflict and Unity of Contemporary Art, by Mario Dionísio, establishing a dialogue between the three-dimensional work and the author's painting, At the Table, by the Oil Lamp (1948), selected for this exhibition.
SUSANA GAUDÊNCIO
The artist presents two works in this exhibition. The work A World Within the World (2018) consists of a composition of posters on wooden structures and the video-animation A Play Between Black and White Holes (2018). Both evoke the text of the conference Conflict and Unity in of Contemporary Art, by Mario Dionísio, and the work Black Square, by Kazimir Malevitch, presented in 1915 in The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10.
For these projects, Susana Gaudêncio drew inspiration from this work and, playing satirically with this reference, she develops a critical narrative that is intertwined with the fascination she experienced with Sartre's description (in his novel Nausea) of an abstract work, an excerpt referred to by Dionísio at the 1957 conference, to exemplify a plausible, or hypothetical, description of an abstract painting. Unlike the Supremacist works, in A World Within the World the artist uses images of fragmented objects, figures, or situations, natural and mineral forms, reproducing images of objects at different zoom levels and imposing them as a reality.
This reflection is also transposed into the exhibition space and enriched and complemented by the video-animation A Play Between Black and White Holes, which elaborates on the underlying concepts.
