During what was touted as Rui Sanches’ last lecture on 24 April at the University of the Algarve (where he taught for eighteen years, beginning in 2006), the artist was magisterial. Magisterial in the true sense of the word: he adopted a professorial, magister stance and attested to his deepest knowledge of art history: its history, its art. But this statement should not be interpreted as a declaration of reductive egotism. Sanches recounted his artistic career, initiated in 1977 when, after quitting the third year of his medical degree, he irreversibly devoted himself to the visual arts: first to drawing and painting, then to sculpture. He spoke of himself as a third person, as if he were the best connoisseur of the work, its motivations and key moments: he was a critic of himself, the author of his own artistic biography. The best viewpoint is the one you have from the inside out, as if from the outside in. To some extent, T. S. Eliot’s lesson (which the artist celebrated in the summer of 2022, honouring the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Wasteland with a beautiful exhibition at Lisbon’s Galeria Miguel Nabinho) remains with Rui Sanches – as the poet wrote in Four Quartets (1943): “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”[1] Whilst the “first time” is a still unknown place – the other – the place from which you set off is the one you know – the I -, converted into the unknown of the self and the object of ceaseless exploration.

This oscillation between being inside and outside, between seeing from the outside and simultaneously from the inside, as if it were something that could automatically adjust the vision of a single subject about himself and of an other who was himself, is what Rui Sanches’ works at Galeria Trem – Manuel Baptista in Faro are all about. The exhibition works as a sample of an anthology, rather than an anthological exhibition, and from this sample we can see some of the artist’s thematic tendencies or constants.

As Mirian Tavares explains on the exhibition text, Sanches is an “artist who primarily loves lines”: those that simultaneously divide and combine different spaces and multiple layers of definition, for example in the four pieces (are they drawings-photographs or photographs-drawings?) on the wall opposite the entrance and which, according to the artist, were the starting point for thinking about the exhibition. Each one is divided in half at the top; the photographic image prevails on the left; on the right, against a white background, the drawing, visibly at odds with the photograph, but built on it, lengthening the image lines fixed by the camera – selecting them, highlighting them and, in doing so, emphasising features (of sea pebbles, plant outlines) that the photograph could have downplayed in the more chaotic whole of what can be seen. The photographs on which these pieces were constructed were taken on an Algarve beach near Sagres. This makes this four-piece set a kind of site-specific work, in a non-traditional sense: the site, the place is not limited to the gallery walls, but engages in dialogue with it by identifying the region that prompted the work. This is a look at oneself, because it’s from the place where Rui Sanches has worked for the last eighteen years teaching Visual Arts; nonetheless, it’s a look outside oneself, at the historically artistic possibility of representation, of connecting with the surroundings.

Rui Sanches’ Algumas obras reveal new doors to the whole of a work, to art in a global sense. One of his recorded accounts from the studio where he worked for several decades in Lisbon, Sanches describes another studio where he began his practice a few years earlier: “At first, it was quite challenging […] the studio was brand new – this studio contains a history of many years, of leftover things, of accumulated rubbish, of memories that bring up other things – I live very much in this continuity, of not making any ruptures in my work”[2]. At Galeria Trem – Manuel Baptista, the continuity from one work to the next can be witnessed, the variation between sculpture and drawing, the journey through time, which led the artist to start modelling with clay, bronze and other materials in the 1990s, contributing, as the new millennium dawned, to pieces built up by overlapping sheets of plywood, like the two sculptures on display in the gallery, as if holding up the other works on the walls. On a number of occasions, Sanches refers to the inaugural step of his expression in art: sculptural reinterpretations of the intricacy of Nicolas Poussin’s classicist painting. Sculptural art is not detached from two-dimensional painting, but rather extends it, reinterprets it in a compulsion to cross over into the painting’s inner space, as if each painting were turned into a living place equal to the one outside it. The sculptures’ three-dimensionality allows spatiality to be explored: in the beginning, Sanches wanted to wander around what is happening in Poussin’s paintings, endeavouring in these visits to wipe out the idea of separate times, materials and modes. He continues this journey, inviting the visitor to walk around the different pieces (both the sculptures and the drawings, which they project).

Instead of focussing on the passage of time described in his art, Rui Sanches shows how the pieces articulated between themselves make up the history of art – the history of his art.

The exhibition is at Galeria Municipal Trem – Manuel Baptista until June 12, 2024.

[1] T. S. Eliot. (1943). Four Quartets.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQbYsJ9N-04