The language and form of stone is a language of time, a form of time. The cells of the land, an elemental composite of rock, stone is also a testimony of labour, of utility, of community, of settlement. It is the polished stone and the rough stone; it is the smooth stone and the striped stone. Records of cultures, abandonment to the elements, records of passages under our feet, it is on the stones that man and nature write their great deeds. To some extent, the history/ story of the stone will always be a part of the history/story of the art and vice versa.

Curated by Marta Jecu, A Cultural Interpretation of Stone Part II is an exhibition that explores through document, literature, photography, drawing, sculpture and painting the plasticity and weight that this material had and has in History universal. The artists – Marta Alvim, Patricia Morosan, Stéphane Raynal, Louis Cyprien Rials, Jorge Santos, Ludovic Sauvage, Pedro Sequeira, Vincent Voillat and Gilles Zark – reveal the poetic, pictorial and physical dimensions of the stone. According to the curator, “The entire project is the outcome of a double fascination: on one hand for the persistence of this material in art and its enormous role in the history of arts, and on the other hand for the transformability and hybridity of this matter – in both past and present. As the oldest support of information in humanity and a primordial artistic matter, stone offers itself to interdisciplinary approaches”.

Between the essay and the image, A Cultural Interpretation of Stone Part II is on display at Livraria Sá da Costa, Galeria – Espaço Camões, until February 29.