“The sun gives without receiving: men were aware of this long before astrophysics measured this unceasing prodigality; they observed it ripen harvests and linked the splendor that is his to the gesture of he who gives without receiving.”[1]

Georges Bataille argued that the Sun embodies the energetic excess that drives and permits the whole of the general economy that he proposed to analyse. Indeed, the Sun is pure excess which, when channelled towards the Earth, can only be partially taken up in the different mutations (social, economic, biological, etc.) which will also result in excess. It possesses a paradoxical nature where we also encounter the source of all life and beauty, and the origin of the most definite destruction, not only in its emanating heat, of which we can only feel a very infinitesimal fraction, but also, and more dramatically, in the simple act of looking at it. Bataille draws this narrative back to the myth of Icarus, which splits the sun into two: ‘the one that was shining when Icarus rose above the earth, and the one that melted the wax…’[2]. This contradictory nature, whose more burning side is emphasised by the author, will precisely dictate an energy economy whose trajectory Bataille will chart for all human exchanges and transformations, encountering in the Sun, in its expended energy, the act of giving without receiving that allows for all the ensuing effects. This is precisely why the sun can be the most abstract of all objects or, symbolically, the very abstraction itself, the one that no one has ever seen.

Hugo de Almeida Pinho’s approach is specifically inspired by this object, to represent that which cannot be seen, but can only, as the artist states, be observed through some sort of mediation. The exhibition Endless Sun: Capital Blindness, on show at Lisbon’s Carpintarias de São Lázaro, is the second part of the Endless Sun project, curated by Paulo Mendes, whose first instalment Endless Sun: The Cinematic Sunrise is being held at Braga’s gnration. It is the outcome of a protracted research process in which the artist travelled to places such as the Noor solar complex in Ouarzazate, Morocco, the Synlight lab in Jülich, Germany, and Coimbra’s OGAUC, recording these contacts in several pieces using photographs and videos. This dialogue with the institutions and scientific processes devoted to studying said object, constructing the mediations that allow us to observe it in some way, is highly noticeable throughout the exhibition, particularly in Solar Capital, Noor II and Noor III, for instance, where the protagonist, instead of being the Sun, becomes the very structures that permit us to contact it. Hugo de Almeida Pinho proposes to do the same thing, to make us see what cannot be seen, specifically in a parallel dialogue, in which the artist acknowledges and uses these expressions to his benefit. His methods for doing so are certainly different from those of the institutions he has been to. They are not driven by scientific accuracy and precision with targets laid out by tangible causalities, but rather by a will to plastically explore the physical, chemical, political or psychic dimensions within it. A recurrent choice in this regard is the constant use of the screened image, whether on film or digitally -, the image that arises precisely from light. If the actual light projection, and its resulting output of meaning, can be compared to an energy supply originating from the sun and dispersed in earthly concreteness, this connection becomes particularly evident when we consider the example of Celóstato, where the 30-metre 16 mm projection is quite literally held on a high-altitude apex: to look at the roots of these images forces us to take a glance upwards. There is another example on the ground floor of Carpintarias, in Estado de Exceção, combining solar image projections with a circular rotating brass structure that switches between the projection being hidden and allowed, between night and day.

While, as we have mentioned, the relationship with the Sun may be divided precisely into two antagonistic processes, in philosophical terms, as the clarification of ideas and the source of enlightenment, or as the root causing Bataille’s libidinal excess, the exhibition elements effectively try to define these two paths. On the one hand, by combining mediations with the Sun from clear scientific references (whether in Solar Capital, Solar Drawing, Noor II, Noor III or This thing called solarity, for instance), pieces such as Imobilizado, two painted iron structures, suggest a ceremonial relationship that bears a striking similarity to that of the Aztec peoples with excess, as referenced by Bataille. These structures are found underneath the massive Solrad, a giant Sun sculpture attached to the ceiling. The dual Sun-human relationship becomes clear: ‘The sun is the sheer illumination that would be concomitant with truth, the perfect solidarity of knowledge with reality, the identity of exteriority and its manifestation. To contemplate the sun would be the ultimate confirmation of enlightenment. (…) Combined with this nourishing radiation, like its own heart, is the other sun, the deepest, blackest and most contagious (…) From this second sun – the cursed sun – we receive not enlightenment but sickness, for everything it wastes on us we are ourselves bound to waste.”[3] In a more straightforward reference, the very title Visions of Excess designates three painted pieces of iron (two of which support prints), where the vision of such excess seems to be tied to the vision of this object resulting from the metallurgical act, perhaps the closest thing to a literal handling of solar matter. Indeed, when we look at the series The sun is neither a master nor a slave. The sun is a comrade, we find iron pieces whose Sun is depicted and painted in different ways, and where the very process of shaping an iron form looks like the light emanating from the sun: from the Sun comes the iron; from the Sun comes the form (in iron). For the two floors of the Carpintarias, the artist Jonathan Uliel Saldanha composed two distinct and unpublished sound pieces, developed specifically for this exhibition and in direct dialogue with the works of Hugo de Almeida Pinho.

We must then remember the importance that Reza Negarestani directs towards the abolition of heliocentrism, i.e., the enslavement of the human being to the Sun as an element that is representative of an absolute exteriority (be it reason or excess). The quest for ecological emancipation would entail the need to look for a new, contingent exteriority, since the Earth/Sun dialectic would be an indication of a more general relationship: ‘whether seen as radical paths of openness (ways of letting go into the abyss) or turning towards non-dialectical negativity (dying in ways other than those granted by the organism), different ways of connecting exteriority mobilise the terrestrial sphere according to the climates of the cosmic abyss.’[4] Hugo de Almeida Pinho’s proposed confrontation between artistic creation and solar cosmology, in multiplying the Sun in various representations, brings otherness into this field of contact: an ecology ‘based on the one-sided powers of cosmic constraints’[5], where the very act of looking for different representations for something that cannot be seen, of pitting absolute abstraction against the ability to translate it into meaning, embodies the room for the greatest potential for reorganisation, namely that of creation. Perhaps, regardless of its theme, this would result in the creation of a new Sun…

Endless Sun: Capital Blindness is at Carpintarias de São Lázaro until February 16, 2025.

[1] Bataille, G. (1988). The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption, pp. 28-29.
[2] Bataille, G. (2004). Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, p. 58.
[3] Land, N. (2005). The Thirst for Annihilation, p. 20.
[4] Negarestani, R. (2010). Solar Inferno or the Earthbound Abyss, p. 3.
[5] Negarestani, R. (2010). Solar Inferno or the Earthbound Abyss, p. 6.