Rui Valério exhibits Sonatas and Interludes, an individual exhibition which will be present at Galeria Kubik (Porto), starting on November 25.

The artist shows a body of drawings whose intent is to be simultaneously interpreted through its visual properties and musically.

Rui Valério thus proposes a kinesthetic experience of drawing, to the extent that it creates its own “notebook of composition”, by conceiving “drawings that explore different types of graphical approach”, also using a variety of techniques and materials, moving away from the concept of conventional drawing, the so-called gesture drawing. One should not forget the artist’s work who, like in previous exhibitions, has been accustoming us to a historicist evocation of art, particularly the suggestion or the evocation of the minimalistic period, which advocated a suppression of abstract expressionism.

In these same drawings, developed on a musical sheet, the artist inaugurates an exercise of addition, deletion, deconstruction of the sheet’s very own structure.

Under the perspective of resizing the sheet to fit the gallery’s architectonical scale, the space is also occupied by punctuations and emptiness, in an approximation to the site specific working concept.

Some parts of the exhibition are the translation of a sound reality into a drawing reality, contained in waves, and suggesting the principle of Goddard that “to see is also to hear”.

The work of the artist is not alien to the concept of ownership, with the gallery’s room also being filled with parts that suggest, given the issue, a reflection about the field of authorship. In reality, it awakes or raises important issues about appropriation, given that appropriation, more than simply undermining the authorship of art, can even be helpful to strengthen and value this authorial growth.

On the other hand, it sheds light on the subject of authoritarianism that is found in the mandatory compulsion for artistic innovation. Since every time a piece of art is made, the artist is forced to create something new, or is required to be the author of the whole process and all the details of the work.

Therefore, in a liberating perspective, the first artists who emerged and resorted to the principle of ownership were innovative, since they proved that the compulsiveness for innovation in the work of an artist was an imposition that appeared to be authoritarian and oppressive of the artist’s activity. Given that, and according to Rosalind Krauss, even the biggest copyist is not exclusively an agent of imitation, he is rather, sometimes, the master of innovation.