Inhale, Exhale (self-breathing kit) by Paulo Arraiano
The questions of ecology have taken the art world by assault, with an activist practice that draws from the compositive and speculative tools of art to think.
But similarly, and without forgetting the aesthetic parameters that founded the theory and practice art, the art that works around nature and the environmental systems recalls the underlining awe of nature: the wonder in the tumbling waves, the poetics in the particle physics and the smoke swirling in the air, the hope and joy at birth and the decomposition and recomposition of life after death. It’s biology, all right, but it is also bewildering, hypnotising, beautiful.
Inhale, Exhale (self-breathing kit) by Paulo Arraiano is a project which recalls that same bewilderment, those complex telluric events that render in our human eyes an aura of inexplicable surprise.
Between meditation and immersion, and making use of the digital technology, as recurrent in his portfolio, Arraiano conceives a video essay which narrates the greatest natural epic of elements through mutations and physical states through transmutations. There’s a search for unicity, synchronicity as if there’s an underpinning desire to fuse our body with the shown images, precipitating ourselves in a state of liquefaction and posterior evaporation. Therefore, in Inhale, Exhale (self-breathing kit) Arraiano summons the senses for the deeper reflection of ourselves within the natural chaos.
Until 11 July, at Travessa da Ermida, Lisbon, with a curatorial texto by Borbala Soós.