Only a paradox remains

The art curator João Silvério once referred to the artist Bruce Nauman, regarding a work by Gonçalo Barreiros on a book worked on by four hands, those of the curator and the artist, in what the context of the use of the word in Barreiros’ works and their titles concerns. The question that led Silvério to appoint the phoneme, the written word, its diction, or the rescued inscription from an appropriated object, later recontextualized — like, for example, Sem título, Tampa de esgoto, in 2008 — remains present and is absolutely inseparable from the poetics and disruptive nature of Barreiros’ work, as well as its resonance with the craftsmanship of the work of the sculptor and its conceptual dimension.

Recomeço do Mundo is the title of an installation with large, and variable dimensions that takes up three rooms of the balanced and functional architecture that characterizes the space of the CAPC (Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra). This work is crafted from scraps, waste from other works, being worth remembering the exhibition Declaração Amigável held at the Galeria Vera Cortês, which also had one work in the gallery space. In this 2017 work, Gonçalo Barreiros guts the gallery, leaving its broad space almost untouched, using only a wall in order to concentrate the body of the viewer against the shapeless circles that make up that sculpture, taking us back to models of differently sized inner tubes belonging to bicycles or other motor vehicles. However, these objects, leaning as if they were in a workshop awaiting the resolution of the hypothetical «declaração amigável» [friendly declaration], refer to a relational paradox between the remote possibility of the used reference and the operability of the artistic object as a palimpsest of its material meaning and simultaneously of its naming, which is perpetuated in the re-inscription of the word in our memory.

There are some similarities and contradictions in the two works Silvério refers to. The similarities between them, apart from the human factor present in the craftsmanship that ironwork or steelwork requires, are the thought behind the space and its context, evident in the way they are exhibited, diversely occupying the entire space, where the work and its container merge into a singular, specific object. The placement of the title contributes to this similarity, as previously mentioned by João Silvério, accentuating the term «disposição» [placement] since it is so operative and destabilizing to the many meanings the works awaken, becoming part of their composition, just like the painting covering the metals the works are made of, and which are very important in the time the viewer spends observing and in the strangeness they are subjected to.

On one hand, Recomeço do Mundo is entirely a metaphor for the reinvention of the world as a subjective experience of the work, shown in the intermittence of its reflection of light and the extension of the CAPC rooms, and which reappearing disappears among colored threads, polychrome sheets, and helical bodies that seem to guide our gaze. But this is not a work to be observed in an exercise of getting closer and further away, in which we recognize the differences in magnitude between the shapes and the micro-events they contain. It is presented to us as a landscape that, as we walk through it, makes us feel the inability of the body capable of injuring it, stepping on it for example, which places us before the contingency of space in the face of the body it no longer recognizes. Therefore, it will most likely be necessary to restart re-learning how to look, to reconstitute our corporeality with a perceptive capacity we could identify as performative. But performativity is not the intention of the artist, because the drive behind this vastness is just simple arithmetics, that add elements in its special composition and in the dimension these can add to others. All coming from the thinning out, from the transforming action that other works demanded, and which was left behind as if a studio, at its limit, excessive: an immense repository of memory and procedures. In the end, nothing more is left than initiatory matter and the need to rethink the idea of space without losing sight of the exhibition venue and its architectural conditions.

On the other hand, however, Gonçalo Barreiros’ work is guided by a stern discipline, focused on the conditions and relationships his work can create in the exhibition as a perceptive device that will trigger all human senses. Not only through drawing, sound, noise, word, humming, or metallic shrillness; but also, through balance instability, different scales and proportions, or the lack of color and, paradoxically, its multifaceted presence, intersected in scattered planes and lines, as if an anamorphosis took over the space, in this specific case, of the three spaces from the galleries.

In Recomeço do Mundo, Gonçalo Barreiros reconfigures an idea materialized as a commentary to chaos, not cosmic chaos, but an idea of expiration of norms and metric which the sculpture/installation indexes to that initiatory state built from what is no longer namable, no longer has a defining form and, for this very reason, is matter in its purest state, ready to be worked on as if for the first time, despite containing all the previous matters (re)starting there. Nevertheless, and just like the 2008 work Sem título, Tampa de esgoto previously mentioned, this exhibition is an attempt and a challenge concerning an important issue in art history: the specificity of work in a given context and space, and not in just any context and space. This reminded art curator João Silvério of a citation by Richard Serra, transcripted as follows: «The specificity of site-oriented works means that they are conceived for, dependent upon, and inseparable from their location. Scale, size, and placement of sculptural elements result from an analysis of the particular environmental components of a given context. The preliminary analysis of a given site takes into consideration not only formal but social and political characteristics of the site.».

The project for the CAPC galleries is a proposal that contains within itself the reconstruction of that space as a place of work prolonged without a defined beginning or end, since by entering it, we constitute ourselves as part of the perpetual movement that can only exist there, independently of becoming, but undoubtedly as an introductory design to an organic bond in the rigor and memory of its architecture.

João Silvério