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Two Feet by Six Feet, by Hans Schabus

Within me, how much of this space is there? Or, rather, how much of this body – dull, weak, monstrous – is there in this space? This body, a proportion, an encounter and a yardstick of a relationship with the outside and the other.

The built space combines hypothetical, idealised and abstract metrics. Architects are asked at the beginning of their training: where is your metre? They are asked: find your metre in your body. After all, the inch has been cut off and the foot amputated.

A metre is an outstretched arm, plus the short amplexus from one shoulder to the other. More or less. Actually, less and less, as the body becomes more deformed. That outstretched arm, plus what goes from one shoulder to the other, has been my way of measuring space: standing against the wall, sometimes I turn on the most distant tip of the arm – middle finger raised – and other times I turn on the most distant tip of the shoulder. And so I continue, measuring the space in a clumsy and awkward waltz, finding metres and centimetres in each position, but also noticing how many of me fit into this space, which ceases to be one and becomes a place – a construction now filled with disjointed memories and identities in perpetual transmutation. My perception of the space-identity is now made through the body-identity, my body, dull, weak, monstrous, between the metric system’s abstract universal conception and the individual, personal, idiosyncratic notion of the body as a measure of things, the world, life.

Le Corbusier was almost right: the Modulor could have been the alternative to the metric system, were it not for the modern obsession with idealising the perfect prototype, picturing the ideal, universal body from which we could measure a world, one that could never be the world.

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Hans Schabus’ Two Feet by Six Feet is an essay on this perception of the body as a measure, of space and of their multiple relationships – more or less metric, more or less bodily. Ateliê do Rego offers a compositional approach to a body occupying a space. Or else, Ateliê do Rego presents a de-compositional proposal of what makes up an identity – both a reflection of a place and a body. In fact, through body and space – occupied and filled by many different entities – we acquire a sense of individuation and subjectivisation.

Hans Schabus is not an architect. But his practice stems from a profound reflection on the human, social and political nature of space and its perception, constantly shaped by questions of belonging, presence, absence, multiple and concurrent temporalities, tangible or spectral forms. The major phenomenological references spring to mind. Schabus contains traces of Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as the studies that each initiated on the poetics of space and the numerous sensory, psychological and physiological perceptive layers. The body mediates and makes the transition between multiple spatiality; it moves through, experiences and navigates space’s visible and invisible geometries.

We may infer the subject and the nerve fibres that make up this palimpsest called space. Roaming through Two Feet by Six Feet is to enter Hans Schabus’ different social and psychological strata. Across three works, he reveals who he is, what he looks like, what he does and where he comes from, trying to get closer to the audience by establishing a connection, from a distance, into an inward-looking dialogue. We gradually develop a mental image of the artist through his work boots, his height gently recorded by a hair on a tape measure, his handwriting in the letter of introduction he wrote in Portuguese. Schabus sees art as something deeply personal. It is about the artist and his cosmos.

Three works. Because these are three (de)compositions. There is no need for more. The paucity of these pieces is inversely proportional to their intimacy and size. Hans Schabus appears in his absence, an oxymoron that only Art can validate and render plausible. He greets us, he salutes us – the hand of the Esconso #2 editorial project waving at us, “Hi, how are you?“, and asking for a touch, a mark, an affection, an appearance.

Installing Two Feet by Six Feet in a studio is not a coincidence and proves the kinship between Hans Schabus’ work and that of hosts Nuno Sousa Vieira and Rita Gaspar Vieira. The studio is, for all three of them, a place to permanently represent the world and its various materials. The studio is where the meaning of life is crafted, between strategies of proximity and distance, construction and deconstruction, creation and re-creation. The studio is where one shapes and works out a hypothetical reality, undoubtedly filled with tension and conflict, but also with affection and sharing.

Hans Schabus’ Two Feet by Six Feet is on show at Ateliê do Rego until December 31, a curatorial project by Nuno Sousa Vieira and Rita Gaspar Vieira.

José Rui Pardal Pina (n. 1988) has a master's degree in architecture from I.S.T. in 2012. In 2016 he joined the Postgraduate Course in Art Curation at FCSH-UNL and began to collaborate in the Umbigo magazine. Curator of Dialogues (2018-), an editorial project that draws a bridge between artists and museums or scientific and cultural institutions with no connection to contemporary art.

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