After participating in artistic residencies in the Azores with Portuguese and foreign artists, and later in collaborations with the artist Sara Bichão – with whom she became involved in an intense and fluid hybridisation of paintings, drawings, performances and sculptures – the French artist Manon Harrois[1] reveals to us, at the Foco gallery, an unfolding of explorations and experimentations between artistic media, resulting from her contact with nature and the fishermen of Cascais beach.

Following on from her collaborations with Bichão, in the current solo exhibition Não Faz Mal, the artist is pursuing the idea of sharing as a couple, ‘based on a network of creative exchanges, which has evolved into a broader dimension, of a social nature’. The artist is keen on a series of practices that establish ‘a territory of multiple interconnections, gestures and supports’[2].

During the year-long process, a committed fisherman brought to the gallery bits of plastic and nets gathered on the beach which had been used to catch octopus on the coast.

Traces of these same fragments, assembled by the artist, are clustered throughout the gallery, bound to each other and turned into small dwellings. Their mesh-like structure intensifies the very nature of the connections built through the pieces that have been found. Green plastic nets, with blurred outlines, can be seen in groups with others of latex, either sagging against the wall or merging with the first, more stiffened nets. They express the flabbiness of perenniality, the solidity of finitude. This is the subtlety of something ephemeral and fragile, which is covered and externalised.

Gentle, milky corals are spread out, dangling down from a gallery area. They reveal their iridescence, their simultaneities and emphasise their heterogeneity. The essence of nature is once again shown in its ephemerality.

In unusual, unexpected places, other tiny coral fragments emerge. One must look deeply. The artist is constantly challenging our perception.

A vulva-shaped black rock was moved to the gallery entrance. It astonishes us. The stimuli all seem to be vying for our attention. They are so wonderful, in fact, that we are tempted to grasp them all at once. They are competing, pulsating in front of us. I’m struck by Amanhã há mais, from 2024. Then Leme, from the same year. A dialogue between elements builds the structures: plastic, latex, rope and remnants of barnacles are seemingly the most commonly used materials.

The pieces blend together and reveal different recesses. A site-specific endeavour establishes a relationship with space that has been carefully developed by the artist: ‘Of course, space is not a mere extension, but a relationship, an architecture built on an immersed topography of affections. An ambiguity persists in a space so understood, in its shifting map and in the inversions of the supposed ‘inside’ and ‘outside’,’ Maša Tomšič points out in the exhibition text.

The work Sopas (2024) is an inside and an outside gradually deepening, comprising the construction of a model in a transportable kit, made of plywood and raft, accurately transcribing the gallery floor. Fish traces are visible inside, reinforcing how transient life is. An extract from a poem by George Bataille, the artist’s favourite author, may well illustrate this fleeting aspect: ‘The excess of darkness / is the brilliance of the stars / the cold of the tomb is a fact’. Or Nicolas Bourriaud, to better illustrate singularisation, ‘in an incorporation of existential, personal territories like tools which help to invent new relationships with the body, with fantasy, with the passing of time, with the mysteries of life and death’.

Manon Harrois’ Não Faz Mal is Galeria Foco until December 21.

[1] Sara Bichão & Manon Harrois, Centre d’art contenporain/Passages, 2019
[2] Maša Tomšič on the exhibiton text.