Pelo que não se vê, curated by Rita Gaspar Vieira, brings to an end Nuno Sousa Vieira’s lecturing stint at Instituto Politécnico de Tomar. With a strong relationship with photography, the artist pushes us to his lens, or rather, reminds us of its limitations. Inevitably, to see is to lose, as George Didi-Huberman claims (quoted in the exhibition text by the curator). This inescapable condition is underlined by Nuno Sousa Vieira at Centro de Artes e Imagem.

We are greeted by an idea of absence, which is perhaps why the space appears inhospitable. A site is transformed into a place through the presence and body of the aesthetic operator. Have we lost it? Yes. We cannot find the time to see everything. But isn’t the world also like this?

The Ícon works are the conceptual backbone. But when we see the gowns worn by the artist or the absent space, he highlights in Reunião, we feel the unfulfillment that is trying to reach us. Ícon, a work created for Pavilhão Branco from a 19th-century image, departs from a black-and-white representation of the sun. Every time it is exhibited, there is a new impression derived from the original. Ten years after the first time, there are changes triggered by oxidation, making visibility a direct agent in the work’s material alteration. As if to say for you to see me, I need to reproduce myself, so that you do not understand what your vision does to me. Besides this, Nuno Sousa Vieira may change at any moment the position of the four Ícon in the venue, and the spectator will scarcely comprehend it. A compendium to understand the vision: we believe in what we see, we do not suspect, we do not notice; but more important than that: it is not because we have not seen that something did not happen, like almost everything that occurs.

There is a temporal relationship as if Nuno Sousa Vieira were occupying an invisible space (I would say Tesseract), from which he acts in a more or less plastic way. Two Together, an intervened wooden door from the artist’s studio, or even Porta de Saída, an aluminium and iron door at the entrance to the exhibition and, inevitably and ironically, at the exit: objective transformations in space, made by the artist, adding timeless plasticity, as if levitating in the atmosphere of the relationship of the body’s memory with the memory of the space and of the objects that fill it. A collage made with what we see and what we no longer see or no longer know how to see. An attempt to reply to this inexorable condition of vision and perhaps of life. Besides the greatest plasticity that we can find, there is also this temporal relationship between visible and invisible. Especially in the artist’s gestures in space, of which we can only trace the ballast; which ironically, perhaps, we are shown in a visible form. Apart from the already mentioned four work gowns, reminiscent of an action that may have happened, we must also point out the works from the series Visão embaçada, where we again realise that our vision is easily fooled.

To be visited until May 31.