PEDRO GOMES & MARIA TRABULO

VIEWS AND PANORAMAS

What does each person see? How do they see? Maybe these aren’t physiological, technological or even aesthetic matters. Maybe they’re mainly ethical and poetical.

I don’t know who will be able to tell what does one see in the night-time or during daytime looking at the sky or looking around in the middle of the ocean or in the centre of the sky, looking ahead, or down, or up, in the middle of a street surrounded by buildings and maybe trees, in a beach or in a balcony, at the top of a skyscraper or at the bottom of a boat.

We could say that you can see everything. Everything that surrounds us, as it used to be said in the heroic epoch, when one thought that we could be conscient (that’s how it used to be said) of the reality that surrounded us. The time when people dreamt about the possibility of reason or representation, to be aware and in charge of reality. That was the utopical goal of “panoramas”.

You can also say that you can’t see anything. Nothing is maybe what the crowd of inapts sees that wherever they are, looking into a small screen where it is impossible to see images or words that have any relation to thought and therefore (with the possibility of a thought in relation to) reality.

We suggest questions and possibilities that don’t allow replies but suggest problems, researches and speculations as more fruitful as less subdued for ideological prejudice and more open to the need of complexity and multiplication of points of view. That’s why the artists are the ones who keep on offering the best resources to approach these questions.

The works of Maria Trabulo included in this exhibition send us to a problematization of the vision and representation of the sea. A range of several themes, from the most abstract lyrical or metaphysical speculations to the most dramatic social, daily, realities. How do you see and what do you see when you look at the ocean? What’s underneath those sights and what is remaining from them? Colours, textures, light, darkness, salt, tears …

The works of Pedro Gomes in this show will maybe send us to a problematization of the vision and representation of the architecture (in the most common sense of built spaces). How can you see and understand the image of a city, buildings, a space of exhibition? What is it save in the memory of the experience of walking and looking in the middle of the street or a museum?

The artworks of these two artists mobilize, with refined elegance and tenacious rigour, specific formal values inherent to the artistic practices following a strand sometimes close to abstraction. We have contours (of drawing, horizon, vanishing lines), colours or their absence, textures, overlaps and re-compositions of fragments, layers, hypothesis of representation, evocation and convocation of images and imaginations of visions and experiences of realities. Maps, patterns, models.

However, before and after the formal values, I think it is decisive here the presence and possibility of understanding that what each one sees depends on the standpoint that one adopts and, mainly, the archaeology of the inscribed memory and the wishes and aspirations projected through the view of each one of us.

Alexandre Melo

July 2019