corpo de pedra

RUI CHAFES | SANDRA ROCHA

At first glance, both Sandra Rocha’s photographs and Rui Chafes’s sculptures show a certain impossibility of putting a name to the works, while at the same time asking viewers for an intimate, lengthy and corporeal involvement. Although this encounter between two of the most prominent visual artists on the Portuguese contemporary art scene—each of them with their very own practices and diverse backgrounds that could never be summarised here—could be considered unlikely, in both cases, the long-lasting relationship with these works ultimately reveals the common inability of containing them in a simple conceptual formula or, more generally, the unnecessary words in relation to the works. The titles are an example of that. When they are not absent, refusing to provide clues or keys on how to understand the works, they often simply indicate concrete (and never abstract) nouns of the greatest sensory suggestiveness—such as stone, body, sand, skin—or merely mark a geographical and physical presence in the world—such as the Azores, China, Georgia—or fragmentarily evoke a literary image in flight. Something of the shared resistance of these works to being translated into words has meant that, in both cases, poetry has become a favoured method of approach by critics, as an oblique way of giving insight into their web of affective relationships between body and space, the intensity of which is never held hostage by description or explanation. In other words, this is not about language or communication. In that sense, the positions taken by Sandra Rocha and Rui Chafes subvert the two artistic media on which these old expectations weigh most heavily: they are neither photographs nor sculptures of or about anything.

By emphasising the poetic potential of the artwork over the narrative of a message, Sandra Rocha and Rui Chafes sail against the current alarm in contemporary criticism about the progressive transformation of art into theory—a discussion that goes back to the early German Romantics such as Fichte and Novalis, key references in Rui Chafes’s work, and which culminated in Hegel’s famous prognosis about art’s growing tendency to distance itself from beauty or perception, becoming increasingly discursive and theoretical until it finally becomes philosophy, moving “from the poetry of imagination to the prose of thought”. It is no coincidence that the type of aesthetic experience proposed here is characterised by a very particular kind of attention, sensitivity, and presence of the elements of the natural order—sometimes starting from a personal wandering through geographical and emotional spaces that results in a series of incandescent visions, in the case of the photographs, and sometimes forging matter alchemically to generate enchanting morphologies, in the case of the sculptures. This romantic notion of myth is therefore recovered in these works, delving into the telluric imaginarium and refusing its rational instrumentalisation, in a succession of suspended spaces or displaced times that ultimately aspire to a timelessness made from contingencies, tinged with melancholy and desire, emptiness and form, loss and elevation. Italo Calvino once proposed explaining literature through two natural phenomena at the origin of living beings, the crystal and the flame, in other words, between an explicit organisation of different structures and a constant appearance born of internal ebullition. Only such a vocabulary could accompany this exhibition, but it would be even better to do without it, since these are works with no ultimate destination.

Afonso Dias Ramos

September 2024