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Rui Chafes\'s solo exhibition \'Entrate per la porta stretta\' Enter by the Narrow Gate | 11/11/2011 | |
 Rui Chafes\'s solo exhibition \'Entrate per la porta stretta\' [Enter by the Narrow Gate] is a sculptural itinerary conceived for the Sassi of Matera, and in particular for the spaces of the ecclesiastical complex of the Convicinio di Sant\'Antonio and the Murgia Materana Park. The exhibition project, curated by Giacomo Zaza, is sponsored by the Basilicata Regional Council, with the patronage of the Province of Matera the Embassy of Portugal, the Instituto Camões and the Portuguese Consulates in Naples and Bari.
Rui Chafes\'s sculptures form part of an ongoing project exploring the possibilities of dialogue with the host space and architectural context. They act in and on diverse locations, from the rooms of galleries and museums to the natural scenery of parks and beaches.
On this occasion he has conceived an itinerary that falls outside the traditional canons of sculpture – a sort of \"anti-sculpture\", obscure and indecipherable, \"participating\" in the host space. His works for Matera become wandering souls, disturbing presences in a location that is archaic, mythical and simultaneously very human. Inside the liturgical architecture (niches, ribs and apses, groin vaults and pendentive domes), these \"anti-sculptures\" act in osmosis with the interior and exterior space, and in symbiosis with the human and the sacred.
Ethereal and dynamic, Chafes\'s sculptures often suggest abstract and organic bodies, like beings in metamorphosis. At times their physical presence conveys the sensation of a living pulsation, establishing an intimate and magical connection with the surrounding environment. Chafes always works in steel, which – painted black – gives his sculptures a \"visionary\" aura, born out of their relationship with an inner dialogue, in net contrast with the mercurial world of globalisation, dominated by speed and the elimination of space and time.
Chafes ponders the conjunction of earthly and divine so thoroughly explored by Pier Paolo Pasolini in the film \'The Gospel According to St Matthew\'. With Pasolini in mind Chafes has entitled the exhibition \'Enter by the narrow gate\' (refering to Christ\'s words, “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it”). On one hand this project invokes the “ethical principles” defended in Pasolini\'s film (his Christ who, in his battle against religious hypocrisy and the lust for power, goes so far as to call himself “son of God”, an affermation punished with death), and on the other the religious and secular architecture of Matera, with its ancient caves and “its human labyrinths made of stones and isolation”. Like a bird that leaves no trace as it crosses the sky, Chafes\'s work in Matera becomes a form of divine apparition, just as Pasolini\'s Christ appears both divine and mythical.
In the \'Convicinio di Sant\'Antonio\', a complex composed of four cave churches [Sant\'Antonio, San Donato, Sant\'Eligio, and San Primo or the Church of the Tempe Cadute] Chafes constructs a rich scene: Inerme [“defenceless”], four sculptures resembling iron beds, hospital beds, or animal-like beings, each hidden in one of the subterranean spaces (crypts, perhaps, or chapels, hewn out of the rock) in the four churches; Mondo misterioso [“mysterious world”], two pairs of sculptures that seem to be tools for walking taller, like crutches or stilts; Il tempo è il mio unico amico [“time is my only friend”], four black iron “boxes”, or, more specifically, four rectangular cuboids inserted with absolute precision into troughs or pits dug in to the ground (probably tombs). Here, rising only a little way above floor level, the mysterious containers express a sense of death, but not only that. Their regular geometric forms also dialogue with the amorphous space of the Churches, and of Matera\'s Sassi as a whole, and they speak of time which, here, is still and suspended, a basis for reflection, a metaphor for art.
Further on, between the vaulted aisles and the curving inner chambers (the lateral chancels and vestibules) we come upon Luna morta di freddo [“dead cold moon”], a sphere emerging out of a stone trough; then Il silenzio di Giorgio De Chirico [“the silence of Giorgio De Chirico”] and Il labirinto di Giorgio De Chirico [“the labyrinth of Giorgio De Chirico”], two sculptures suspended from the ceiling in an echo of De Chirico\'s archaic world. In Della povertà e della morte, small sculptures resembling spoons or cutlery, of no obvious use, animal-like, usurp the space, hung from the apertures that run across the walls. The title of this piece, “Of Poverty and Death”, is from Rainer Maria Rilke, and these little sculptural forms are as dreamlike, obsessive and terrifying as sickness and death themselves. In Lama [“blade”], three sheets of iron inserted into the windows and punctured with little holes “filter” the light, darkening the interior space. Through the small holes one can view the limestone canyon of the Murgia Materana Park onto which the Convicinio di Sant\'Antonio faces. The scene continues with Quel che è virtù per la società è dissolutezza per il santo [“that which for society is a virtue is dissolute in the eyes of the saint”], a sculpture formed of two concave vertical elements resembling spoons and which, behind a superficial symmetry and regularity mask an imbalance and unevenness (a state of insecurity). Then there follows La vostra allegria è la vostra tristezza senza maschera [“your joy is your sorrow unmasked”], a piece which is organic in form, recalling the animal world, an illogical and irrational vision. Lastly, in front of the church complex, L\'oggi così lento e lo ieri così breve [“today so slow and yesterday so brief”], two great, black cones, approximately 2.5 metres high, stand on the harsh, stoney land of the valley. Two cones, isolated and “metaphysical”, to be observed from a distance: two abstract bodies that become alchemic, “neo terrestrial” forms to be probed and queried.
What really interests Chafes in the Matera project is the metaphysical “temperature” of the sculpture in relation to the location; the connection between the ambigious depth of the space/land and the mysterious substance of his sculptural interventions, the visitor ending up (in the case of Lama) spying on the surrounding valley plain as though it were a secret room to be discovered. Chafes\'s art sets up a series of reverberations between the various levels on which it can be read and its appropriation by the viewer, forcing us into a “voyage” out of ordinary existence and into a fantastical world. Along the way the exhibition site loses the conventionally neutral characteristics of a host “container” and becomes an active context for the work: the location and the skillfully contrived solid forms combine to form the artwork in a weave of interrelated references and recollections, layers of subconcious memory (dreams, death and pain) and interiorisation.
Biographical notes
Rue Chafes was born in Lisbon in 1966. From 1984 to 1989 he studied Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon, and then from 1990 to 1992 he studied with Gerhard Merz at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. There he came into contact with a different cultural history: German Romanticism, medieval and late Gothic (the role of light and of weight and mass, the harmony of proportions, the relationship with nature, with the surrounding space and with Man), the German Romantics like Novalis, Goethe and Kleist, the gothic sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider and Andrej Rubliov. During his time in Germany he translated Novalis\' Fragments. He also fell under the spell of Andrej Tarkowsky, Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Marie Rilke, Nietzsche, Beckett, et al.. In 1995 Chafes represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale (together with José Pedro Croft and Pedro Cabrita Reis) and in 2004 he participated in the Bienal de São Paolo. Solo exhibitions have included: Würzburg Bolton Landing, Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 1995; Durante o fim, Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna Colecção Berardo, Palácio Nacional da Pena, Parque Histórico da Pena, Sintra, 2000; Kranker Engel, S.M.A.K., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, 2001; in 2002, El alma, prisión del cuerpo, Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid; Leçons de ténèbres, Galerie Cent8- Serge Le Borgne, Paris; Ash flowers, Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, Esbjerg, 2003, in 2004, Ash flowers, Kunsthallen Nikolaj, Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2005, Comer o coração (with Vera Mantero), Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbone; Augenlicht, Museum Folkwang, Essen; Fora! (with Pedro Costa), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Oporto; in 2007, Onde estou?, Fondazione Volume!, Rome; Nocturno, Fundação Eva Klabin (Projeto Respiração), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Eu sou os outros, Galeria Graça Brandão, Lisbon, A mesma origem nocturna, Jardim Botânico, Coimbra, 2008
Location: Sassi di Matera, Convicinio di Sant’Antonio, Parco della Murgia, – Matera
Admission: free of charge
Inauguration: Saturday 26th November 2011, 6:30pm
Exhibition dates: 26th November 2011 - 31st January 2012
Exhibition curator: Giacomo Zaza
Organisation: Respira Puglia S.r.l.
Via Melo da Bari, 70 – Bari 70121
tel: +39 346 7280071
email: respirapuglia@gmail.com
skype: respirapuglia
Press office and communications: Michela Casavola
Oderberger strasse 43, 10435 Berlin
tel: +39 347 4823583
email: m.casavolacomunicazione@gmail.com
skype: michelacasavola
Submitted byMichela Casavola. # ns03082 | | | | Top |
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triangle arts association | 11/02/2011 | |
Does Not Migrate, Triangle Network Conference and Triangle/FUTURA Open Studios
October 27, 2011
Does Not Migrate: November 3 – December 1, 2011 Reception: Thursday, November 3, 6-9pm
Triangle Arts Association is pleased to present the work of three of our Artists’ Workshop alumni, Matt Ager, Craig Drennen and Gamaliel Rodriguez. Does Not Migrate will open at our 111 Front Street Gallery, Suite 222, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
Three very different artists seek to upend the traditions of looking at a work of art.
Submitted byTriangle. # ns03081 | | | | Top |
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Susan Torres
Dona
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Jimmy Wang
Waiting for Partner
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Miroslaw Chelchowski
refreshing my mind
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Cervio Barbara
happy drops
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CAURI GALLERY CUBAN ART
Cubanidad es Amor |
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Phil Hanaman
apprehension
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