The Centre Cannot Hold at Monitor Rome
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(…)
After having established itself in Lisbon back in 2017, Monitor is now presenting its first group exhibition in Rome, curated by Mattia Tosti and featuring Portuguese artists.
Its title – The Centre Cannot Hold – is taken from William Butler Yeats’ poem The Second Coming and provides the springboard for choosing artists who represent a portion of the Portuguese art scene. This group of artists, from different generations, working in different media (such as painting, sound and sculpture), is testament to a centre incapable of achieving its role as a unifying force. They deny the natural centre and challenge the recurring narratives that reverberate in a conformist manner.
Alice dos Reis with her video experimentation, Diogo Pinto with his paintings, Gabriel Abrantes with his cross-disciplinary approach and his ghosts, Inês Brites and her familiar and symbolic sculptures, João Pimenta Gomes and his use of sound to address the relationship between body and space, Lourdes de Castro with her shadows and absent presence, Maria Paz Aires with her hybrid creatures, Pedro Henriques and the enigmatic sculpture-entity, Pedro Moreira and masks, liaisons and the fantasy, Sérgio Carronha and the Earth’s elements and ancestry, and Tomás Abreu and optical illusions and sensory experiences form the group that is committed to a non-conformist approach. They do not submit to or adjust to the boundaries laid down by categorisation, but rather propose a second/another/renewed hypothesis.
The exhibition does not purport to be a show with a common, national identity, or of equal trends and stylistic ties, but rather seeks to gather together, in the same venue, the different innovative perspectives that, somehow, and in their own way, attempt or have sought to redefine the standards of the contemporary art scene.
The Centre Cannot Hold consists of works that portray the different artists’ engagement with themes related to identity, memory, the body and space, but in a complex, genuine and unforeseen way that arises from each of their singular universes. It emerges as a sort of centrifugal pull, an imagined force facing the opposite direction, intended to overturn the hierarchy of cultural norms and practices. These are 11 artists, with different ways of producing, who have rejected a conditioned and automated history and chosen the vitality of the material, the energy and power to blaze a trail, allowing for a renewed interpretation as a result of personal and/or structural unease. They are an off-centre protest, the breeders of new echoes, new possibilities and new reflections.
The exhibition can be visited at Monitor Roma until July 19.