Fieldworks
Bergotte’s character in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu is one of many that the narrator dwells on with his characteristic curiosity. At a certain point in the second book, The Prisoner, the man afflicted by a kind of permanent illness breaks his doctor’s orders and goes out to see an old favorite painting by Vermeer, “View of Delft”. The motive that drives Bergotte is the will to confront his memory of the painting with a critic’s observation that, in it, he saw “si bien peint, qu’il était, si on le regardait seul, comme une précieuse œuvre d’art chinoise,” a “petit pan de mur jaune” (“a yellow wall panel” – “so well painted that it would be, if one looked at it alone, like a wonderful Chinese artwork”). Like other motifs in Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, this yellow detail lends itself to interpretive expansion and, as it were, contaminates the narrative in unexpected and vast ways – as vast as the relevance the reader accepts in it.
The color is powerful: yellow, even if in an apparently inconspicuous detail, dominates an atmosphere and propagates into the sensations of contact with art. (It can even be, Proust’s narrative suggests, fatal.) It symbolizes the challenge and the acceptance of the game – the same challenge and a similar idea that is proposed in the title of the exhibition on display at Alfaia until the beginning of July.
The exhibition at No. 18 of rua Brites d’Almeida in Loulé is called “pedra papel ou tesoura” (rock paper or scissors), and it takes on the playful character of art as a sign of resistance and liberation. The resistance that one must overcome to accept a challenge; liberation when one decides to accept it. There is a pictorial gesture by the curator, Rita Anuar (b. 1994), dominating the space – on the far wall, four yellow bars run horizontally across the bottom of the room. They cut the view of the wall, interfere with the three hanging pieces (from left to right, a canvas in darker yellow, by Gil Ferrão [b. 1996), on which are fixed a badminton shuttlecock and a toy arrow; another, smaller, canvas, on which a landscape is drawn in various colors, topped by the name ARTFORUM – Felix Vong’s playwith the cover of an art magazine [read his interview in Umbigo Magazine, last April]; and a yellow hook that holds a green ring, another work by Ferrão) and send the visitor, hopefully healthy, into the game of collocations and non-explicit relationships.
Another of the pieces that seems to clearly assume the aegis of playfulness encourages interaction with visitors beyond passive observation: on a tabletop lies a colorful game board, numbered squares and several different cards that can be handled, placed and replaced, to be played alone or in group. On the wall next to the table, instructions give orders such as “Confirm the competence of this game”, inviting the “suspicious” visitor to accept suspicion and work in that modality before art – questioning, interrogating, not taking for granted anything that is presented is after all the mode of art that sees itself as a game. Even the throwing is not to be done necessarily with the same element: one can use coins, seashells, stones, or dice, which harkens back to more serious and at least as ancient uses of table games, such as the divinatory arts of the I-Ching. The Golden Cabinet, thought up and proposed by the duo Luísa Abreu and Maria Bernardino, who call themselves “Didáticas Obscuras,” comprises the whole: board, cards, table, instructions – and, ultimately, the eventual participants. And it expresses hopes that “chance [may] be happy coincidence and not the work of fate.”
The joy of play is a place of intimacy; accepting the game entails surrendering oneself – this much is apparent from the possibility of flipping through the notebooks of Jiôn Kiim (b. 1982), born in Busan, South Korea, who has been living in Porto since 2017. These are not mere watercolor blurbs, but a sort of logbook whose support are notebooks acquired in Porto: they speak, therefore, of the adjustment to a place, of the search for an identity made of atmospheres of old neighborhood grocery stores, of the rough surface of a paper that is like a new city on which sensations are experienced and adjusted as on the page where one tests the color in brushes. In the room, two plinths and a shack table support three of the artist’s notebooks and invite us to peek into this inner world, the groping, the whispering of a different language. The open notebook on the table – distant from the plinths – is joined by small statuettes in clay or colored ceramic, sculpted toys that one should be able to play with (by Sara and Tralha [b. 1995]): is it an airplane? is it a clay knife? is it a shark? is it a palm tree? The toys travel in the open notebook, inviting – no sign nearby says “It is forbidden to touch the pieces”. Indeed, a ball lurks around on the floor begging to be kicked or thrown at the wall. Is the game dangerous to art? If someone enters the game and throws the ball at the colorful wood planks against the wall of the entrance (also by Kiim), they will destroy the order, the alignment of the wood raised from the floor. But the game will be performed and one may even pretend to have entered a pinball machine: once the boards are down, a tube sticking out vertically from the floor appears, decorated with drawings, pieces of lace fabric and, at the base, the outlines of half-human half-animal figures (rhyming with one clay piece on the nearby wall). These are by another player, Hugo Brazão (b. 1989).
Not far, the head spinning around is that of an Alice who entered the world upside down and comes out through the colors and overlapping drawings by Madalena Anjos. It is a play, little butterfly. It is a transparent play, beautiful mushroom – as in a play, and you can imagine that the limits of the paper extend beyond the cutout and complete what is missing. Instead of a mirror, the overlays offer the translucence of a window.
Other I would say more traditional elements come to play in rock paper or scissors – the name of an almost universal game. They are the different sized colorful canvases by Bárbara Faden (b. 1998), by Luís Rocha (b. 1995), or by the paulistana Yasmin Guimarães (1991). The arrangement and dialogue they create with the other pieces in the exhibition make them, on one hand, enter into the idea of play (the small painting by Guimarães stabilizes the exteriorization of Oliveira’s figures, for example); and, on the other hand, resist an absolute pretense (Faden’s canvas relate to the yellow striped wall in the fireflies in front of a human figure [does it have blue wings? is it an angel?], which challenges the authority of the frontal by being shown only the back), inserting itself in the convention of the framing. Each piece articulates with the others in the entertainment of finding proximities among all: the vertical planks by Kiim with the decorated tube by Brazão and the strips of color in the two paintings (oil showing neon?) by Rocha; the horizontal plane of the notebooks, of the carved figurines, of the supports that project from the walls with the yellow stripes Anuar throws at the viewer: do you want to play with me?
This exhibition is dynamic, it becomes alive at every moment – Bergotte’s curse is annulled: in this game there will never be a crisis of gout or undercooked potatoes to scare anyone who wants to go out and confirm the color of the panel on that painting they adore.
Rock, Paper or Scissors is on show at Alfaia gallery in Loulé until July 1st.
