MEL in the EARLYMADE Cedofeita space
It was on September 21, as part of the concurrent inaugurations of Quarteirão Cultural Miguel Bombarda/Porto Art District, that the MEL project was revealed. This is a collaborative effort between the Italian gallery Monitor and the Portuguese gallery Lehmann + Silva, which will spend a year in different venues of the Portuguese fashion concept store EARLYMADE Cedofeita. With an experimental approach to artistic output and promotion, and an eye to developing new methods of exhibiting and interacting with the audience, MEL will feature and promote, in a non-conventional manner, works or site-specific projects b both rising and well-known artists invited by both galleries.
An innovative and ever-evolving experiment, based in the industrial premises of EARLYMADE Cedofeita – as opposed to the traditional white cube format – MEL, with four exhibitions, is presenting in its inaugural show pieces by Dalila Gonçalves (1982), Sérgio Carronha (1984), Laurent Montaron (1972) and Joana Hintze (1993) – whose works, processes and materials have common features: the presence of memory and the combination of heterogeneous times. Constructing the experience of time and the way in which human beings perceive it are unveiled in the works on display, occasionally accruing anachronisms within them, as well as in their layout and assembly, intended to challenge the audience’s ability to feel the space, either through works anticipated and revealed before entering a given setting, or through disruptions and intermittencies.
MEL is keen to develop new perception, display and engagement methods with the public, as revealed in the first exhibition moment, outside the store, with Dalila Gonçalves’ Pontear #1, 2024, whose presence, given its location in the store window, is revealed to us from the outside, through the glass, as if beckoning us to enter. By dissecting, exploring and (re)discovering objects and materials, Dalila Gonçalves uncovers what makes them unique, making them visible, sometimes poetically systematizing them, other times relating them to other items, as if to create new narratives in an experimental exercise. Her immersion in objects and materials, her inquisitiveness for their plastic investigation, the stories they hold and their primary functions, all reflect the importance she assigns to the role of memory and the notion of time – and its passage – as a medium and metaphor. In Pontear #1, we are faced with a dialog between objects referring to different contexts, like an assemblage, revealing itself in an installation process whose accurate and unlikely connections give a new meaning and identity to the whole being shown to the audience. Hanging from the ceiling, a gray rope joins different elements extending down to the floor: wooden coils from old looms from the Ave Valley and a metal claw – used to hold the legs of old pianists’ stools – clutching a crystal ball, suspended over a water-filled copper dish. The heterogeneity of each element in the installation is compounded – like leftover memories – by the marks engraved on the various materials which, as a result of wear and tear, handling and time, imbue the work with aesthetic, poetic and affective elements. Pontear #1 is notable not only for the reference to textile tradition, in dialogue with the space where the work is exhibited, but also for evoking the manual and gestural action of its elements, the emphasis on the idea of sound running throughout the installation, of a sound promise and memory that is felt, whose various objects remind us of it – the loom, the piano, the water – without it being essential to hear it.
Sérgio Carronha’s artistic work is equally influenced by the collecting act, based on exploring and discovering materials. His creations, on view in the concept store’s courtyard and in dialogue with the garden, rely on memory, the passage of time and attention to the cycles of nature. The artist offers us a sensory experience as we walk among the mysterious and intricate sculptural objects inhabiting the garden area: forms etched into the marble which, much like archaeological finds, summon and revive ancestral knowledge. Similar to Neolithic artifacts, we notice the small marble sculptures, with the artist clearly emphasizing the importance of this raw material, reusing and transforming it by carving and drawing patterns, opening tiny circles[1], revealing shapes and signs in response to a spiritual quest and knowledge. This first set of sculptures is then followed by another – integrated in and with the earth – of flat pieces that, like a game, we find among tomato and basil crops. These pieces have archetypal patterns, symbols and motifs reflecting Carronha’s experience and reunion with the land, the result of a landscape mapping project he has been undertaking in Montemor-o-Novo, where the location of these sculptures on the ground can help guide us to solstices, equinoxes and water sources. By moving and presenting them in this new context, the artist allows us to intimately interact with nature, with its cycles and rhythms, reclaiming and echoing – in association with the previous set – an ancestral and spiritual way of living.
On the concept store’s ground floor, in an area stripped of windows or any elements providing us with spatial and/or temporal clues, we delve into the welcoming darkness that leads us through a physical, sensory and visual experience. Like a revelation, we find photographic and video works by Joana Hintze and Laurent Montaron in the black box area, where memory issues are explored. Placed strategically along the walls, Joana Hintze’s digital and color photographs are autobiographical in nature, unveiling “the noisy interior of the attic of her childhood home, where she finds sculptures, dust layers and memory”. Made during the lockdown, the images of different rectangular formats are bits of everyday life captured by the artist’s lens in an intimate and private setting, where banal objects and situations were intuitively documented through her eyes: furniture, mirrors, suitcases, cages and utensils. Light and textures play across the timeless set, perfectly balanced between the larger photographs exploring the sculptural potential of everyday objects and the smaller ones revealing a detailed view of them.
Together with Joana Hintze’s images, we watch the three films by Laurent Montaron projected onto the walls of the venue: Philosopher’s Stone (2017), Memory (2016) and Lick (2018). The experimental and engaging vocabulary entices us. Alluding to the mythical alchemical substance able to transform any metal into gold, the video work Philosopher’s Stone takes us back to a historical memory: the creation, in post-World War I France, of counterfeit copies with real gold of Gold Napoleon coins, the coin that we continually see being melted down in the film on display. With a percussive and jazzy style, in a rhythmic and juxtaposed sequence of images, Memory has as its central character an IBM Memory typewriter which, forgotten and left in an attic – like Joana Hintze’s photographs – comes to life, an ironic and humorous reference by the artist to the passage of time using the history of technology. Lick‘s dreamlike and sensual scene reveals the touch and interaction between two senses – sight and, precisely, touch – at the same time, leading us to a frozen moment that brings the group exhibition to an end.
The exhibition is open until November 9.
[1] A sign related to eternity, the divine and time which, symbolically appealing to the perfection and purity of forms, points to a universe between cosmology and cosmogony, sending us back to the endless cycle of creation.