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Cooperativa dos Pedreiros: José Pedro Croft at Galeria Nuno Centeno

One of Portuguese visual art’s most celebrated artists, especially for his sculptures and geometric paintings, José Pedro Croft (1957, Porto) has been pursuing an artistic trajectory based on architecture, namely the arrangement of formal space and its memory. He is exhibiting for the first time a series of circular sculptures and drawings at Galeria Nuno Centeno, located in the Cooperativa dos Pedreiros, initiating a dialogue between the site’s brutalist architecture, as well as highlighting the former workshop area, and imparting a sense of rhythm, physicality and symbolic and relational depth to the site, all of which are reminders of minimalism. There is also a strong attachment to the history of the Cooperative, founded in 1914 by a group of stone workers, whose headquarters were built in granite between 1937 and 1953 in the quarry where they mined the building material, by architects Maria José Marques da Silva and David Moreira da Silva..

Anthropologist, poet and essayist Luís Quintais, in Educação pela pedra (2024) – a text released as part of the exhibition – writes about the author’s practice: “Struggling with the substance of time and matter is indeed one of the artist’s greatest aspirations in his plethora of mediums and registers, the cornerstones of which are sculpture, engraving and drawing. Croft appears to be most concerned with an art dealing with the nature of time, and, in this field, the world’s materiality is one of the pathways to the nature of time.” In fact, the exhibition reveals different timelines, since the memory of the place is one of the substances with which the author moulds his practice – in this case, that of the Cooperativa dos Pedreiros, symbolised by the stone that gives life to the institution.

First, and broadly speaking, geological time, the time of the stone as a loose fragment of rock, composed of minerals, of which the Earth’s solid outer layer is made up. The time of the raw material used by sculptors and labourers over the centuries. Biographical time in Croft’s work with stone, in his formative years with the sculptor João Cutileiro. And then there’s the time of the aesthetic experience, the result of the artist’s pieces and their specific layout in the exhibition venue.

Besides the memory of the place and the different shifting layers of time, the sculptures and circular drawings inside the space are particularly noteworthy. Not by chance, the circle was chosen to give shape to time. A geometric figure that carries a strong symbolic charge in this realm.

Throughout the gallery, between different circles – in prints drawn in gouache, varnish and India ink – of various colours and sizes, disjointed, aligned or interrupted, we are struck by the rhythmic sound of the various chromatic stains and lines of contrasting widths, frequencies, expressiveness or orientations. The same happens in the three-dimensional circles – painted iron sculptures – as if it were improvised music, with high and low sounds, sonorous and jarring, but at the same time harmonious, powerful and disruptive. But there are forms that intone a different vibration, such as the iron and mirror sculpture, bringing us back to our integral image in the compositional space. Or pieces that lend another momentum, such as the rectangular iron and glass sculpture, which seems to be swallowed up by the floor. At once fragile and robust. Then there are forms offering a new intensity to the visit, a new sense of space and our corporeal relationship with the work, such as the large painted iron sculpture, made of two semicircles, with vertical bars, almost intertwined, arranged on the floor, giving a kind of final chord, but in infinite ouroboros.

Cooperativa dos Pedreiros by José Pedro Croft will be at Galeria Nuno Centeno until June 20, 2024.

Ana Martins (Porto, 1990) currently working as a researcher at i2ADS – Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade, with a fellowship granted by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (2022.12105.BD) to atende the PhD in Fine Arts at Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto. Already holding a MA in Art Studies – Museological and Curatorial Studies from the same institution. With a BA in Cinema from ESTC-IPL and in Heritage Management by ESE-IPP. Also collaborated as a researcher at CHIC Project – Cooperative Holistic view on Internet Content, supporting the incorporation of artist films into the portuguese National Cinema Plan and the creation of content for the Online Catalog of Films and Videos by Portuguese Artists from FBAUP. Currently developing her research project: Cinematic Art: Installation and Moving Images in Portugal (1990-2010), following the work she started with Exhibiting Cinema – Between the Gallery and the Museum: Exhibitions by Portuguese Filmmakers (2001-2020), with the aim to contribute to the study of installations with moving images in Portugal, envisioning the transfer and specific incorporation of structural elements of cinema in the visual arts.

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