Lisbon, 1968. Porto, 1987. Two landscapes and almost two decades physically divide Paulo Brighenti and David Correia Gonçalves. They meet halfway, between drawing and sculpture, in the village of Maceira. Then, at Brotéria. Braço Cruzado, inaugurated on March 31, puts three new creations of these artists in confrontation, making them dance in the three exhibition rooms on the cultural venue’s first floor.

In “a place of profound symbiosis” [1], Brighenti and David’s familiar traces allow us to identify a tension that brings them together, as if they have long been creating side by side. And indeed, they do: even if their preferred themes differ according to the artistic domain and the intention of each work, the questions posed by their works seem to taper off gradually, with a peculiar attention to materials, to readings on nature. It is a free experimentation across definitions and boundaries of the medium – whether abstractionism or figurativism, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation or performance.

Everything is introduced at the outset. Our journey through Braço Cruzado is immediately crossed by the large Tronco (2023) in paper, wood and graphite, brought to life – or extracted from it – by David’s hands. The sculptural object, a kind (what kind?) of still life, is living proof of Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier’s principle of conservation of mass, which is widely known: “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”. This is the paradox of the works of the Porto artist. And also, in that of Brighenti: there is a “raised time, embedded in the body” [2], containing in itself all the memory of matter collected, moulded, processed, printed. All the dreams of the world.

It is almost as if the growing months of the tree brought to Brotéria, which we can only know through the textures underneath David’s grey paint-drawing, were condensed into the months in which the arm exhausted the graphite and the graphite exhausted the arm. Now, it is a vibrant work before the gaze and skin of passers-by, inviting an ancestral touch. “My time in splinters: a piece of memory, this unwritten thing I attempt to read; a piece of the present under my eyes, on the white page; a piece of desire, the letter being written, but for whom?”[3].

Perhaps for us, perhaps for a shared past-present on the verge of extinction. Perhaps for Mãe (2021-2023). Paulo Brighenti’s creations seem to add a counterpoint: after all there is something fundamentally lost with every material death – human, animal, vegetable or even mineral. Anecdotes and details, names, crossings, the timbres and melodies of voices, they all vanish. Whole biological and emotional ecosystems disappear, which we humbly try to reconstruct and pay tribute to. I think this is one of the interpretations of the Lisbon artist’s series, which includes a beautiful concrete “rock” floating on one wall, giving birth to a plasticised and petrified plant: we are witnesses to different worlds that are becoming increasingly fragile. A choice has to be made – “Shall I conserve? Shall I keep? Shall I forget?” [4]

In the last room, where the homonymous work of the exhibition is found, we realise that Braço Cruzadodoes not only describe the fertile collaboration between Brighenti and David. All the multi-actor intersections that partake in their artistic adventures are celebrated: the family histories, the stones, the surviving bees, the impressible rainwater, the flax and poppy oils, the ovens that metamorphose clay into ceramics and, I believe, anti-inflammatories for tendonitis. In this field of complex contention that is art, there are difficult, profound and intractable relationships with the artificial and the natural, the meta and the physical – all these bodies and agents that, whether living or not, are restless and stir movement. It is impossible to quantify or understand this huge physical and spiritual energy that we live with – for now, suffice it to say that Braço Cruzado almost succeeds.

The exhibition is at Brotéria, in Lisbon, until May 4, 2023.

[1] Exhibition room leaflet.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Didi-Huberman, Georges. (2017). Cascas. São Paulo: Editora 34, p. 10.

[4] Id. Ibid., p. 10.