Something’s not right.

There is a conceptual and social deviation here that is surprising.

The first work is the stage that precedes the inauguration. The expectation is crafted, shaped, and then thrown to the ground.

It’s painting, right? Artists are painters, that’s what they say on their resume. Therefore, it can only be a painting exhibition.

And it isn’t.

This is the initial surprise of Pedra e Vento [Stone and Wind], a project by Tiago Baptista and Mariana Gomes, in Buraco, which allows us to see artistic practice as a material and affective exercise, even if this implies abandoning the pictorial practice that is characteristic of them.

There are, then, two moments: the good-humored play, which has something more profound than a mere event of frustrated expectations; and what lies before us – a long table, filled with small clay objects carved by the artists.

The opening joke denounces a way of being before the work of art that is often, if not always, shaped by preconceived ideas – a priori data that are composed and that often complete what we see, what we feel, what we experience. The experience of art is thus mediated by a cultural condition and by the way we understand the portfolio and the artistic background of this or that artist.

Thus, it becomes imperative here to readjust the gaze and the spirit, which cloud this optical, thinking device, which sees beyond what is factual and speculates in abundance. Because what we have in front of us, in fact, are not the vibrant and metanarrative paintings of Baptista, nor the abstract and gestural experimentalism, markedly plastic, of Gomes. If this project is proposed as a work in pairs, perhaps working on another subject is a timely and wise way for both to meet and find together a way of working that allows the strengthening of a friendship that was born or consolidated through a deep love of painting.

On a table and blue cloth, small clay objects rest. They are miniatures of mushrooms or other fungi, clocks, little devils, primitive structures, utilitarian artifacts, and others that are hard to read, but of poetic exegesis – the crystal marble, which rests in the center of a whitish mass and which seems to form a faint ripple. The gaze wanders among that row of small swims or small worlds. Is this what is meant by topophilia – a term used by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space to describe the strange feeling of being faced with such a constriction of spatial planes that makes the imagination boil and live intensely in a place, a room, a bedroom, a living room? What did he say? That the “miniature is one of the refuges of greatness”[1]?

We make ourselves small, we invoke all the imagination of childhood to go through this table of little things; we summon to the assembly of Baptista and Gomes’ minutiae the hidden fantasies of tales and fables, of fabled History, since we glimpse a demon and an Adamastor, who make themselves miniatures to enlarge the world.

Yep. Something deeply moving animates these miniatures. They speak to a lost childhood, locked away in the cultural artifices of time and biology. They are familiar objects as if they had been shaped by the hands of many childhoods, of all those that preceded and succeeded us. It’s comical and melancholic – “melancomical” indeed. We remember the trinkets that we keep at home: a vaguely kitsch gift, a medal for good behavior, a crystal globe brought from who-knows-where, a souvenir from Africa, from overseas (thrown into a drawer, because now it’s embarrassing and we should avoid talking about it). In the same way that they rescue memory, they crystallize it. They are testimonies of “stone and wind”, like a breeze that walks along the rocks of thought. The murmurs of memory, stir the imagination and become representation.

At the same time, and despite the richness of the pieces, the sgraffito and drawings engraved in clay, this is an exhibition that lives a lot from the process and the images we glimpse of the artists at work. It is a labor product, of objects begun by one and finished by another – a way of producing in pairs, which on other occasions could be seen as somewhat licentiousness: Baptista and Gomes seem to scoff at the loneliness of the creative act. There is joy here in the subversion and shameless surrender to the limits, failures, valences, and powers of both. This mutuality is the conceptual force behind the curtain, beneath the blue cloth – the pillars that sustain the reverie served on the table, uncommitted, in theory, but serious, in practice. A flickering reverie, at last, like the light of space, which ends on the wall and renders the image of a vanished sunset, perhaps taken from a dream or a last-minute improvisation.

Between the artists and the memories intimacy we keep of mundane objects, Pedra e Vento represents a rare exercise in the ever-expanding reading of art, and how it manages to build a mystical aura that challenges not only the senses but also the imagetic sediments deposited within each one of us. We never saw Baptista and Gomes working, but we can imagine them there, at the table, discussing life or talking, as Gomes confided, between handfuls of clay, the painting that unites them – Courbet, of course, but also all the others: today’s contemporaries and yesterday’s contemporaries.

Pedra e Vento, by Tiago Baptista and Mariana Gomes, is on display at Buraco, in Lisbon, until March 29th.

[1] Bachelard. G. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. P. 155.