A Casa Térrea

CAT Casa das Artes de Tavira, Portugal
August 19 | September 9 2022

A casa térrea, the title of this exhibition, is a poem by Sophia de Mello Breyner. I believe this author feels a relationship between the nakedness of the light of the Algarve and that of Greece. That amazing light, like a hammer, reminds me of the poems of the Greek poet Seferis:

Light is a heartbeat
slower and slower
it seems as if it were going to stop.

It is a sensation as if everything is that light. The light is the object, and what remains is a scorched earth remnant. I imagined the exhibition as filling a void with that earth. Earth that is a trace, a path, the fossil of the gesture. For me, that landscape of the Algarve has a link with the idea in art that one cannot speak of the contact between the image and the real without speaking of a kind of fire. Therefore, one can only speak of images by speaking of ashes The selection of works was based on these ideas. The exhibition consists of the confrontation of two large format paintings, 5 m x 2.5 m, from the series I made in Arantzazu that occupy an entire wall, one black as if burned and the other transparent but which is the trace of the first, with a series of 100 ink drawings on Japanese paper, made in my new studio in Lisbon and exhibited as a logbook, with fragments of poems by Sophia de Mello, Rui Nunes, Herberto Helder, or Henri Michaux and Maria Zambrano, which I read while I was doing this work. I am interested in contrasting the material density and weight of the large format paintings with the lightness of the handmade Japanese paper and the drawings that are almost traces of ink, traces that emerge as the paper dries and that transmit the memory of the shapes left by the tides in the salt flats or on the shores of the Ria Formosa.

 
Conversation between César Barrio and Liz Vahia.

Full interview: ARTECAPITAL