Linha de chão, an exhibition by Rui Neto, curated by Delfim Sardo, consists of a set of projects carried out over the last few years, exploring the tool of designing as a means to interpretation and representation of the space and having notions of limit and power as the «linhas» [guidelines] of its production.

Rui Netohas developed an extensive body of work in designing, that assumes the form of a diary almost, although centered specifically, and almost entirely, on the physicality of the space he covers.

His approach to designing with exquisite graphic quality always derives from two recurring key points: the point of view on a physical entity of the city (a wall, a sequence of façades, the ground), taken from the exercise of looking; and a certain form of cartography of the represented entities. The complexity of his formulation of space, the topological relationship raised by his designs, and the almost obsessive attention to detail are inherent elements to his education in architecture, as well as his practice as a researcher in this area. However, these aspects do not restrict or change his designs into an exercise in style linked to a project or even to a gesture.

The exhaustion of the urban space and the time palimpsest that results in the ground he steps on, or on the walls and façades he observes, are recurring in a series of long works about segments of the city, almost as if it were from an anthropological and scientific design exercise. Like scientific illustration, his works offer a possibility of understanding space that is far superior to what could be found using photography or film (which he actually uses as a preparation for his works).

In other designs, however, a speculative dimension appears in the cuts of buildings resulting in a possibility of defining spaces that always exhibit traces of usage, possible microfictions, and unlikely connections.

In these cases, his designs seem to summon the memory of Georges Perec or a set of chapters that were never written in Life: A User's Manual.

Neto has recently been working on the back of baroque altars, giving visibility to layers of sutures, almost chaotic wood agglomerations, and chaotic compositions of repairments (resulting from another vision of the baroque), bringing to the surface of the paper the organicity and the randomness that fascinated artists such as Lucio Fontana or Gordon Matta-Clark.

Perhaps the key to comprehending the exhausting method of his design work lies in the notebooks he fills, the only time when we come into contact with his designing exercise by sight and, in that sense, making visible the way he takes a point of view, how he conceives the representation of space, how narration is present — but also how designing is for Rui Neto the practice of a theory from a line.

Delfim Sardo