The exhibition Expunção by Xana Sousa and Nelson Rodrigues, curated by Jorge Reis, is on view at EMERGE‘s Casa Azul until May 27.

The artists and the curator have backgrounds in different areas, but share the field of Visual Arts, where Drawing is one of the main ties, as well as the relationship between body, space, and work – combined with the notions of time, memory, and history. One of the highlights is the bridge between art and critical thinking, embracing the political and philosophical side of each individual and life in society.

How does each one work and interpret these concepts and relationships, particularly in the Expunção exhibition?

Nelson Rodrigues – As an architect and artist, I have an enormous interest in the relationship between drawing and construction, and how drawing constructs our movements, and our life. From a philosophical angle, each trace has social and human repercussions. I like to think about a trace on paper, the extension of that trace and thought, that communication of the hand and the mind. I want to explore these alternative forms of drawing and think about drawing as matter and not just as surface; drawing with objects, materials, and tools. In an analogy with drawing, the tool also draws and constructs our reality. Together with Xana, we came to the subject of sandpaper as a drawing surface, but sandpaper can also be a tool. This is how we draw and build objects.

Xana Sousa – Although I have a background in Painting, I have been directing my practice towards drawing – both scientific and abstract drawing, even rescuing the materiality and the drawing of old papers. I use papers and materials from family members’ homes, which can tell a new story, and have a new format, not only taking advantage of the lines and drawings on these papers, but also putting a new drawing on them. I also use them in a more sculptural way, as occurs in a work presented in this exhibition – the pleated paper acquires structure, movement, and three dimensions, not only with the image printed on the original paper but with what I can place on it afterwards. The drawings attached to these papers recall things from childhood; that is also what interests me in drawing: how we can recover those memories and how we relate to those objects.

Jorge Reis – One of my favourite techniques as a curator is drawing. I have been looking for artists that go beyond the limit of drawing as a single support between the scratching medium and the paper, that reach a different field from the point of view of the relationship between the one who draws, the tool, and the support. The destruction of those borders and the reach of the technique itself seems to be what interests me the most, apart from the audience’s participation. This was a fortunate encounter, where the work was fluid, complicit, and synergistic.

In Desenhos Rebocados by Nelson, we note the perceptions of the relationship between the drawn (and plastered) canvas and the wall, inspired by Georges Perec’s essay Wall.

This subversion of space, and the overlap between the wall as support and the work, is coupled with the mixture between elements of Architecture and concepts of Visual Arts that you explore in your work. Right, Nelson?

NR – Right. The encounter with this essay was almost like witnessing someone writing or thinking about what I had been feeling for a long time but had been unable to put into words. That relationship between image and wall and space is a concern of mine. With these works, I manage to make almost a simultaneous act in which the image is the wall. This is a game in which, when we notice one thing, our mind forgets the other and vice versa. I can do it here simultaneously. Another thing that I like is to think about the image and what it represents for us. I am interested in the image as density and not only as surface, and the way we surround ourselves with images nowadays. This work is a provocation to think about how the image constructs our spaces or life, overriding the image by being it. There is no traditional image, but it is still identifiable. And I am also interested in the idea of annulling and synthesising the images we keep to ourselves.

Unlike the rawness and materiality of Nelson’s drawings, Desenhos Riscados and Desenho Plissado by Xana are more delicate and fragile. The former seems to evoke the idea of death as the expunction of the being, making the body absent by hiding it in space and time. In the latter, the delicate and folded material is what shows and hides the drawing.

Xana, can you explain to us how these drawings came about and what they mean?

XS – Death belongs to us all, doesn’t it? Although it is often a difficult subject, it is something we think about recurrently. When talking about memories too, we always experience a sense of grief for a moment that has passed, or because we remember someone who is no longer with us. And that was something I also wanted to think to myself – to consider my body as occupying a space and what that space on earth could be. Although it is a difficult topic, I wanted to depict it gently. Therefore, Desenhos Riscados only has delimitative lines of this space filled by the body. I went back to a technique I used in childhood, where I painted a colour underneath, put black on top and, when I scratched it, the colour showed up. When we remember moments or someone, we also scrape and look for those gaps, even when they are hidden under everything. That contemplative spot is here because we tend to contemplate someone’s space that is there. And that cube or parallelepiped is what we also bring to this exhibition by sanding a graphite cube.

When working on pleated paper, giving it shape and dimension, I also use this digging, scraping, and drawing motion, hiding what I want. Just as we hide what ails or interests us, letting appear what we perceive. Erasing and showing the day-to-day, our life.

On the performative and experimental Desenhos Lixados that you made together, there is a subversion between the medium of the works – unusual sandpaper – and the scratcher. How did this approach come about and how does it relate to the concept of “expunction” and Portugal’s recent history? And what about the open work Desenho Expungido?

NR – The relationship between drawing and sandpaper, in this case, the scratching and scratched elements, is almost a fusion. Or, rather, they are several things at the same time. The scratching element produces a drawing, but then it is sanded. It also forms or constructs itself as a sculptural object, just like the sandpaper that builds the scratching element and then becomes the drawn element. There is a constant concurrence of actions. With this open or participatory drawing, we also try to make the connection with that part of history, through the act of erasing; the act of erasing, scratching, and censoring is quashed here. Before our intervention, it could be understood as an act that scratches and annuls the other; here it annuls itself as it scratches; it is almost as if censorship erases itself.

XS – Our works allow the spectator to have the freedom to get close, to touch them – so we have proposed work for everyone; always with due respect for things, but with the possibility to intervene – this is how society should also operate, with respect, but everyone as part of the work, the great work.

JR – Desenho Expungido turns out to be one of the works with which people can relate most intimately; it is an almost ironic and subversive exercise of the act of expunging. The object that expunges is expunged by sandpaper. This is a good metaphor to apply to the act of drawing – people intervene in the support. First timidly and only later using the range of the body and the relationship with the work; in other words, it carries a performative side.

The whole conversation on Expunção can be heard on the podcast Artistas & Curadores à Conversa.