When the poetics of technique and function are replaced by the pornographic and compulsive gratification of a commercial craving, what do we end up seeing? When the object turns into a hassle and loses its sparkle of novelty. When that porcelain, that glass, those plastic and silicon items are thrown to the back of the drawer, the cupboard of neglected things. When that memory attached to that old carved metal loses its glow and is wiped out, like a star eclipsed and reduced to stardust. After all, the emotional memory of a time echoes in the touch of one of these forgotten objects, as the window into a family history opens up, welcoming in the shimmer of a worldly comfort, a communal sigh that dulls a once-great souvenir to hold within it an intimate, human sentiment.

In estrela-lágrima [teardrop-star], Inês Brites recaptures the memories we hold of these day-to-day objects. We see in them similarities with ancient chandeliers, our grandparents’ opaque glass tumblers, buttons and pins stored in transparent jars or boxes of biscuits and chocolates, perfume bottles that have long been defunct but still preserve a powerful sensuality – or, on the other hand, a kind of plasticity that is supported and preserved in art. It all feels extremely familiar. Each composition and decomposition of objects that have been scavenged and rescued by time strikes a chord with us, an association – cosmograms of a long gone moment, cosmograms of a complex reality made of multiple paces, voices and rhythms.

But there is much more to it than that.

Brites’ work extends beyond the mere finding and re-contextualisation. This is a creative flair that converts these objects into hybrid items: without overturning their primordial nature, the artist gives them another, radically distinct identity – one that triggers a tension between utility and uselessness, between disposable, volatile consumerist drive and perennial attachment. Both sides have their charming appeal, but for different reasons and means. Alongside the accumulated and industrious know-how preserved by objects in the corporate, capitalist and hyper-productive context lies creativity for the sake of it, transformation for the sheer human purpose of recreating and listening to other possibilities, compatible or different, in a given object.

In this experiment in bright colours, in this collapsing star turned into something else, perhaps more interesting and breathtaking, yet without negating the very thing that gave it body and expression – the abstract definition of the astrophysical phenomenon of the teardrop star – Brites sketches an ode to those simple things that sustain and stabilise life, the different forces and magnetisms, be they human or non-human, nervous or inert, organic or inorganic. It all conspires towards a balance that eludes us: screws, carpenter bees, plants, even flies, reminding us that other lives and times exist within our own…

With this in mind, we can also perceive Inês Brites’ work on another level – that of ontopoetics object-oriented ontology or the phenomenology of objects. This is where we find the ongoing communicative reverberation and dialectic between the world and the human being, human structures and the audience. Life teems with meanings, revealed and apprehended by art and poetry in their most pristine essence, without the limitations of scientific reductionism. In this perilous “sculpture garden”, we are called upon to establish an emotional dialogue with the objects, creating and recreating meanings, perceiving and imagining realities beyond our own. Brites compels us to take a renewed and extreme look at the things inhabiting our places, at the hidden structures and rhythms playing with human beings, between them and beyond them. This is a domesticity that speaks, bustles and restores a sense of fantasy to what is commonplace and what makes up life in our spare time.

Estrela-lágrima by Inês Brites is at Galeria 3+1 – Arte Contemporânea until April 27. The exhibition text was written by Filipa da Rocha Nunes.