What is art if not time felt, made real in space – or the embodiment of time perceived, acknowledged in space? With that said, I’m not speaking of the Hegelian Zeitgeist, much less the Rieglian Kunstwollen, but rather of the concept of a threshold between spirit and matter. Nor do I intend to affirm that time is spirit and space is matter – but that the intangibility of time is undone by space and that the materiality of space is undone by time. Within this context, art appears to untie these concepts from their axioms by unsettling our perception of these two variables – time and space. Is it time or space that shapes a work of art? I certainly need time to paint, to shape every movement involved in conceiving a work. However, I also need space to arrange movements and materials. This liminal combination can be called ‘place’: ‘a space turns into a place when, through movement, we inject it with meaning’^[i]. And this place – between space, time and meaning (or signification) – is everything that Art can be. Yet, despite the intellect of this triad, one element constantly eludes the critical reading of a definitive piece of work – precisely due to the notion of completing a project, namely time. And this is exactly the element that is the dominant aspect of the Feeling Time exhibition.

The two-level gallery houses works by three artists upstairs + one downstairs (pun intended) – Bobby Dowler (UK, 1983), Miguel Marina (ES, 1989) and Alberto Peral (ES-BI, 1966) + Javier Arce (ES, 1973). The works shown by the four artists reveal the manifestation of time in multiple ways – each does it in their own manner, in their own medium. And, by doing so, they counteract the temporal standstill of the white cube: time exists inside – not eras, pasts, presents or futures, but motions and oscillations in perpetual becoming.

Following the layout, Miguel Marina’s two canvases greet us inside the gallery. Both feature colours, lines, spots and erratic movements generously populating the canvas. The lingering pictorial plot is recognisable as a rhuthmos. Defined as the pre-Platonic concept of rhythm, rhuthmos stands against the sole idea of rhythm as repetition and metrics. The scholar Salomé Lopes Coelho^[ii] defines it as follows: “rhuthmos not only points to the fleeting configuration of anything mobile, it also speaks of the particular way in which a phenomenon flows, that is, it designates a form as it appears to the observer’s eyes, during the particular moment and movement with which that form occurs. (…) In this sense, rhythm is a dynamic reality seen when it flows, as well as referring to the very nature of that dynamic itself. Analysing rhythm must entail an analysis of rhuthmos”. The perception and emotion of rhuthmos is not easily depicted or signified, since (post)modern society choreographs everyday life by repeating practices and movements, yet Miguel Marina pulls it off, spectacularly, from the moment he brings out one colossal canvas and another fearfully tentative one.

We then encounter Alberto Peral’s brass and steel sculptures. Despite their exquisite geometric design, these call into question Cartesian proportions through an uncertainty of flows, forces and oscillating position patterns. In a dualistic loop, between inside and outside, full and empty – time (past, present, future) is one, simultaneous, unfolding through the different dimensions.

Three Bobby Dowler installations stand at the back of the room, also on the first floor, dialoguing with the previous pieces within a setting between painting and sculpture. In other words, the artist builds paintings by overlaying tarpaulins on canvases. These works draw on affinities and complicities – between materials and artistic genres, as well as between friends and colleagues. The artist and the gallery assure us that Dowler collects tarpaulins and grids from his peers to make these works. This inclination runs counter to the ‘time’ of the works and materials – just as there is a superimposition of elements and colours, there is an overlapping of times (and spaces) – the storyline constructed in Dowler’s canvases devises a sensitive but nearly invisible ‘history’ of materials. Whilst the surface plane may not always clearly display these overlaps, they are there, stacked one on top of the other, forming a simultaneous layering, notwithstanding the invisibility of the first and the uncertainty of the subsequent ones – very much like time. Likewise, Dowler occasionally tears open these same layers, revealing the previous levels as traces or memories – eclipsed by the passing of time, but evident through memory.

Javier Arce’s cross-disciplinary work is located downstairs, divided into painting and installation. The works he presents are found at a crossroads between human and non-human agency (nature). Arce’s aesthetic and formal choices dictate that their natural materials – such as linen and the natural grids on which the oil paint is applied – also adopt their own dispositions and behaviour. The works do not appear to be completed once they have been produced; rather, they are (de)composed over time. Meanwhile, his landscapes of natural structures become almost psychedelic – in what seems to portray a superimposition of times upon the same view, upon the same perspective. On the other hand, the installations appear to lay claim to uncertain spaces or ‘places’, where meaning is formed through ephemeral usage, rather than constructed matter – such as a spider that wove its web around a charcoal stick sculpture, which is still there.

In Feeling Time, the time we sense and recognise throughout the exhibition is that of materials, standing against human agency. In an almost animistic essay, time and space burst forth more strongly than the non-place that shelters them, i.e., the white cube. Nevertheless, we can see that one of these elements will always break through more strongly than the other – time, not our own, but that of the hosting space. As Didi-Huberman once said – the work (of art) is not the past, we are the ones who will become it, the work is the future, ever contemporary to the beholder. Art is therefore always contemporary.

Feeling Time by Bobby Dowler (UK, 1983), Miguel Marina (ES, 1989) and Alberto Peral (ES-BI, 1966) and Javier Arce (ES, 1973) is at 3+1 Arte Contemporânea until September 14, 2024.

^[i] Tuan Y-F. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press.
^[ii] Coelho, S-L. (2020). O gesto da travessia e o contacto com o ritmo vital: Sobrevivências do ekstasis no cinema. Ph.D. Thesis in Artistic Studies, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Nova University of Lisbon, p. 40.