One exhibition but it’s actually two

According to the Swiss philosopher Max Picard in the 1948 book The world of silence, when two people begin a conversation, there is always a third party listening, silence.

Edgar Pires has been working on the many ways to start a conversation in his sculptural practice and has been doing so in a simple, direct and careful manner. His work is unique: an encounter between elements, a process that shows itself and appears in different forms — by grinding a block of metal, sparks appear (the video); from the sparks, the hot iron projection onto the glass appears; then, the filing is left to marinate in molds along with subtraction, addition, drying and oxidizing processes, and questions of the sculpting itself such as balance, volume, and weight (solids). Finally, glass landscapes/frescoes, synthesis of past forms, and prefigurations of future ones (molds and formwork of the sculptures).

The artist has been working with scraps, making object assemblages, reusing shapes and ideas silently, in order to listen to what the material had to say or simply to listen to an intellectual intuition, to return to the start of things.

The works by Edgar Pires present themselves on that line: figures born from a primary action and originary act, of which a set of shapes and objects, but, and above all, a subjectivity as the essential character of the artwork, sticks out.

Thus, the body of work of an artist alludes to various meaning spheres, by referring to different referents in an underground journey that goes from literature to punk rock music. In any case, his work, growing and informing ideas in the field of sculpting, is an invitation to discover and construct one's own narrative or, better yet, a challenge to position one's gaze.

Further debating over the formulation of concepts and definitions, rather than a mere visual experience, sculptures encourage the construction of intimate dialogue, presenting threshold issues on artistic practice and a process of knowledge of formal reality. The research object in Claim the diamonds in your eyes, free and spontaneous or dictated by the chance of encounter at first glance, is meticulously investigated. The sculptures marinated for months in molds previously defined by the artist in a mixture of filing, coarse salt, and vinegar. Once painted and still with traces of the material they contained, the glass molds are reused in a mixture, imposing questions inherent to the gaze: recognizing and constructing a landscape, whether it be a place, horizon, fresco, or idea.

The glass compositions, placed on top of shelves at different heights, are actually the record and negative of the action of time. A process seeking not only the similarities between inherited and constructed landscape, inherited and constructed shape but also a concern to fulfill and fix ideas with a gesture: painting the verse white!

The emphasis that the work of Edgar Pires poses questions associated with landscapes and shapes, is approached from close conditions of the making of the work, specifically by the constant balance between the ephemeral and the perennial and by the intersection of gesture with constructive pragmatics.

The second exhibition by Edgar Pires at the CAPC – Círculo Sereia em Coimbra, Um Tempo e um Lugar, gathers the aforementioned aspects and goes even further by promoting a refined poetic quality. In a new installation of two previous projects — at Ar Sólido in 2015, and at Appleton Square in 2017 — with new works, Pires shows a personal vision of the accustomed, of the already made, shown through reflecting the idea of objects being permeable to different interpretations and codifications over time.

The artist could remake his works many times, always adding something new, which sometimes happens unconsciously, or when the works have already taken on the dimension of memory, or have their own autonomy independent of their actor. Thus, this exhibition is another private story from the artist, who through analogies and associations, showed a desire to repeat things: the theme of time and the repetition that exorcises the end, or more simply as the works consume each other or are consumed by time and people.

Through listening to the material, as previously mentioned, Pires also knows that the paradigms that underpin his sculptural language take shape and act according to a structured system of similarities. These characteristics in his work constitute a certain phenomenal knowledge that becomes an experience and allows for a descriptive openness. Such a process can only be possible by the condition of the existence of an experiential and mnemonic previousness, which is also a code of reading and an interpretation of the complex act of looking, seeing, and observing.

Antonia Gaeta, April 2019