Fernão Cruz: we salt the absent body with grey and bronze

The term “otherness” means the encounter with the “other” for an anthropologist – perhaps we could also say sociology, the science closest to the study and context of our actions. An “other” as in “different”. Above all, it is a relationship between the individuality of the “self” and the realm of the “other”, or the plurality of multiple “others”. Importantly, this meeting is not a hierarchical interaction, but rather manifests itself in a horizontal perspective. By recognising the “other”, we are legitimising the possibility of multiple points of view living together. Indeed, the very existence of the “individual-being” is only possible when this confrontation with the “other-being” occurs and, if we replace the lower case initial with an upper case – “Other” -, then we are talking about society, the stage on which all our actions and performances take place. In Fernão Cruz’s most recent exhibition at Rialto6, we meet the Other, who is not the artist, but who never ceases to be, albeit absent (or not quite so).

We start with Vínculo (2024), the harbinger of a domestic scene. A bronze fire extinguisher is used to stage an entrance or exit through the stairwell. The piece refers to a fire being extinguished, a fire once lit, now put out. Further on, we realise that this two-way meaning of fire, a flame that burns or a residential blaze, runs throughout the exhibition. We enter the room and soon realise that Cruz has managed to handle Rialto6’s sequential levels extremely well. The “living room” on one side is revealed by the glass panel facing Rua do Conde de Redondo; the server area on the other leads out onto the street, underneath the mezzanine where the single bedroom is located. Much like a theatre play, the artist has “mocked up” a residence with rooms for living, lounging and sleeping. Right in front of the door we have just entered is an ajar aluminium window, blinds and a towel. Pausa (2024), the title of the play, is a provocation! Are we indoors or outdoors? Are we observing or being observed? Are these walls damp or are they burnt-down façades? Are we prying into the intimacy of others? Or are we once again in Fernão Cruz’s head?^[1] Everything is inside out^[2].

Whereas Fernão Cruz presents himself in grey in the “living room”, with four large canvases reminiscent of life’s ephemerality, the bronze mop sculpture in the centre of the venue (Lavar o Entulho, 2024) reiterates the lingering routine (in a loop), bringing us back. I write “presents himself” because Cruz’s work contains an intriguing self-representation, either through biographical mementos or his body. That body appears in one of the four paintings (Notícia de Existência ou Pedido ou Recusa, 2024), where Fernão Cruz’s arm snaps, resembling Helena Almeida on an inhabited canvas, and defies us to read other people’s mail.

If we look back to Morder o Pó (a 2021 exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation), particularly to the small bronze sculptures series, we can better understand this tension between perennial and delicate matter. The sculptures (or statuary, an otherwise important term in Morder o Pó) were made of bronze, but the texture and appearance resembled ribbed cardboard, an innocent, handmade game on cardboard, plaster, paper or Styrofoam^[3]. If grey is an allusion to life’s temporary nature, its brevity, then bronze stands against the notion of vanishing, thereby perpetuating memory.

Outro also revisits ready-mades (everyday objects added to the artistic setting), a pattern in Fernão Cruz’s work, which he names using word games and non-obvious expressions, providing interpretation clues. Such examples are the presence of a crutch (O Assistente, 2024), the washing machine containing a bust in its drum (Máquina do Tempo, 2024) – incidentally his father’s bust – or the mop and fire extinguisher mentioned earlier. Everything helps to develop a narrative in which the spectator is drawn in.

We dance on stage to the tune of Fernão Cruz’s broken synapses and crossed memories, searching for the absent body in randomly dumped clothes; the tragic shirt, the invisible body in bed, or the posthumous body and its remains. If Fernão Cruz has got us used to swinging between classical (Greco-Roman) Comedy and Tragedy, then perhaps this is, of all his solo exhibitions, the one in which he strives for purification through catharsis.

Harking back to the opening of this essay, Fernão Cruz’s Outro is an expedition through the lands of Vesuvius, containing all the questions of an artist (I would venture to add the anxieties of a young man) who views art and life as sides of the same coin, hopeful about life, curious about death or the perseverance of life (his life, his work) beyond death. The artist is a non-participating narrator, but he is physically present, performing under the scrutiny of a watching audience (which has been watching him), while he tests, exhibition after exhibition, the salting of the objects in grey or bronze.

Rita Ferreira: wood on paper under glass

After leaving Outro upstairs, we headed down to Rialto6’s ground floor, to a small room with a window facing the outside. Rita Ferreira’s Verónica, the artist’s most recent exhibition, includes four pieces. Four large-scale drawings crowd the place that in another life could have been a shop with a window onto the street. The street is important because it extends the viewer’s visual field, a necessary separation from the pieces – to see close up, to see from afar.

Rita Ferreira’s infatuation with “unconventional” proportions is nothing new. The 21 by 29.7 centimetre A4 sheet format is just a cell, or counting measure broken down into a larger, larger and larger paper origami. But these pieces, especially in this room, take on a different proportion, or at least give the human figure a claustrophobic smallness. Whilst the first striking aspect is the size of the oils on paper (pieces of 2.20 by 2.30 metres), the second is the brightness and light-dark contrasts of the panes covering them. The darkly painted wall soaks up the excess light and brings out the figure in the background, cutting the object out of the space. At dusk (when I visited the exhibition, the day had already fallen asleep and the artificial light was still on), this sobering contrast becomes even stronger, leading us to imagine what these shapes would look like if they were lit only by a lamp.

Rita Ferreira has developed a “literary” body of work: a herbarium, a botanical archive of shapes, a catalogue with colours, shamanic symbols and rituals that the viewer skims through, not only reading the front but also the back. This is also a hallmark of Ferreira’s drawings: looking from the back, from the opposite side of the “main” surface. One is reminded, for instance, of Mal-me-quer (2020), an exhibition at 3+1 Arte Contemporânea, or the installation at Maat (2022) as part of the EDP Foundation New Artists Award – both exhibitions with an innocent, “fauvist” joy, amusingly hallucinogenic, I daresay. On the other hand, the recent exhibition Ayni: Casa de Chá (2024), at Brotéria, followed a different impression, with earthy tones. A table was covered with a transparent glass layer, protecting its surface. We rested a cup of tea or coffee on the drawing, letting the background dregs settle and being enveloped by the magnificent Sala dos Couros. Circles, curved lines, other straight spots emerged over time, and we placed bets on future predictions. At Rialto6, the table is no longer horizontal but leans against the wall, mirroring the viewer. It is still a shop window, albeit no longer a piece of paper. The same blotches are now something else, possibly cork oak and chestnut bark, revealing the seasonal nature of the cork oak forest as it sheds its winter skin, or perhaps they are etchings or some other chemical printing process… Guesses and premonitions. This is how Rita Ferreira challenges the viewer with a Rorschach test, exploring “the art of making stains and the art of interpreting them”^[4].

^[1] A reference to the set of 21 paintings (Cérebro) that formed part of the 2023 Insone exhibition at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, conceptually tied to the artist’s mind and body – the mind the paintings, the body a sculpture in the middle of the room representing his remains.
^[2] For anyone curious about the set design, Fernão Cruz took advantage of a slight difference in the alignment of Rialto6’s walls, using the gap between a protruding pillar to bring the piece to life.
^[3] Indeed, the artist has already worked with the papier mâché technique in previous exhibitions at Balcony Contemporary Art Gallery (Longa história curta, 2018, and The white goodbye: o que entra pelos olhos e sai pelas mãos, 2019).
^[4] As stated on the exhibition text.