Exhibition text - Watermark

Money Museum, Lisbon, 2017

 

The persistence of the place - Leonor Nazaré

 

Paradoxical, almost provocative, the transformation of a space that was a church into a Money Museum challenges our habituation to all desecrations; the world of finance, instead of being expelled, is called to inhabit it. Two hypotheses are posed to each artist who is called to register work in the place: to think the work in the encounter, even if remote, with the project and the concept of the Museum, or to think it crossed by the memory of what the building was in other moments of the past. Carla Rebelo chose this second possibility, which challenged her deeply. The two unpublished works that he thought for the place unearth his memories. The work that occupies the high choir, and which he exhibited in 2016 at the Palácio de Oeiras, redoes the relationship he had with that place; a floor of partially painted mirrors reflects the ceiling, bringing it in an extensive plunge to its surface, crushing, in this spatial illusion, the vertical axis that any architectural space always offers and, most of all, a church. Fragmented, abundant, invaded by “shadows” (painted black spots), the panel comments on the very idea of division and / or multiplication that the mirror contains, suggesting a mobile and “false” space, enhancing the design of the place with its brightness and its grammar; it suggests fluidity of light, liquefaction, easy opening, lying and restless to the appearance of the image.

 

But verticality is called to express its full strength in the work that Carla Rebelo installs in the space that was the altar. It operates in an unusual archaeological way in which the layers (of memories) appear suspended and raised in the air instead of being buried: the artist weaves the design of three walls, reveals two plans of the church, draws later functions of the building, recreates the light. The four layers of information that he proposes to us, returning to the place the reference to the successive human experiences that he housed, recall the church before and after the earthquake, the walls of Cerca Moura, by D. Dinis and Fernandina, the uses as a park of parking and as a safe, already in the 20th century. At the same time, they build a trompe l'oeil, apprehensible from various points of view, paying homage to the intense relationship that the Portuguese church established with the Baroque aesthetic, and the very Baroque principle of staging the infinite folds of space, time, the sacred, human, light, perception, reverie and enigma.

 

The third piece also appears from images of the church, already desecrated and stripped down to the wooden structure. The artist recovers from them the design of Roman arches and warheads to build a door, a portico, a window, an arch, a boat, a whale belly from which / from which the skeleton appears, thus merging architectural substance and organic suggestion, an invitation to crossing and intimidation, welcoming and gathering, collection and gathering, shelter and passage. The collapse of the back wall of the structure opens the entrance, the wall gives way, the bricks spread out and are no longer a compact wall, the outline becomes a shadow and no longer matter, back of the light or consequence of it and therefore dematerialization. The memory of a conceived but not realized relocation led to recreation: it would have been necessary to unravel, undo, displace, redo, but it never happened. The work takes the movement that was within this idea and represents it, makes it present again: with some emotion (movement) and delicacy, but also with strength and determination; making reference to an observed reality but also with the establishment of a fantasy; with the projection of the disorder of the scattered bricks but also with the attention given to the numbers that numbered them, in order to predict an exact reconstruction. The image in time is made by these indications in space, by the materiality of the sculpture turned into a quote, commentary and conceptualization of architecture and history. The temporal regression and the spatial restlessness that the three works propose are made with the lifting of the bones, with the skeleton and the shadow, the specular mistakes and sorcery, the overlaps, the stratigraphy, the forces, the points of view.

 

None of the three pieces can be known without the observer's mobility, his real physical effort, his lost steps. In situ: the works endorse the place, integrate it by integrating it. Poinsot (1) speaks of this when he explains the extent to which the place can be the field and material of the work and that it is a visual and semantic cut of a world or mental space that the observer must reconstruct. Mnesic regression is also a return to the skin that covered these bones (and which the shadow evokes), which involved these structures of things that have disappeared and collapsed by other uses and ambitions; it is a return to the volume contained in these surfaces, in these perimeters that the drawing recovers. The skin also has its layers and, as we read in Paul Valéry, it is really the most profound (2). In the dialogue in which he argues, the character recalls the formation of the human embryo from an ectoderm that closes and gives rise to the entire organism. The brain, the bone marrow, the ability to feel and think derive from and depend on that skin and, however much it is excavated, it is to the skin that man reaches the deepest depths of himself. Many sculptures, and certainly those of Carla Rebelo, have this in common with archeology and architecture: the interest in the skeleton (the interwoven threads, the erected structures, the overlapping designs and layers, the stretched cables) and the imagination of its filling, to the skin - a drawn perimeter, a projected shadow, a mirage or an epiphany on any altar in an old church, an old Lisbon, a new presence that designates memory to transfigure it.

 

From that old Lisbon, it is important to say that the place near this, where the headquarters of Banco de Portugal is located, was an area of strong commercial and financial activity since the 16th century; that the Church of S. Julião joined the Bank's facilities in the 1930s and since then has had different uses, up to recent works, which have transformed it into a Money Museum. The History and vicissitudes of the Church (Patriarchal status, before the earthquake, luxurious reconstruction by the Marquis of Pombal plan, in the 18th century, wildfire, new reconstruction, excavations, incorporation of old materials, discovery of the wall lines) informed and mobilized the work of the artist, who brought to the works the “watermark” (also associated with the printing of money on paper), the indelible identification of each moment.

 

And if the piece placed in the altar space takes on the title, which is also the one of the exhibition, Watermark, it is in the high choir that O Sonho de Orpheus, exhibited in 2016 at the Palace of the Marquis of Pombal in Oeiras, most remits us, for on the one hand, for the overlapping of the medieval Lisbon plan (the black drawing) on the Baixa Pombaline plane (the layout of the mirrored rectangles) and, on the other hand, for that exhibition, held under the sign of water, to which the artist called Becoming Water. It is the city's past that is recovered here, but it is also the proximity of the water and its abundant presence in underground galleries, which is insinuated here - the water we heard, last year, in the sound installation carried out in a corridor in the palace of Oeiras; whose course we imagined in the large wooden dam he exhibited there (wheel and long grooves); the water of the Palace lake over which he wove red cotton threads (3); infinite texture and narrative (Penelope and Ulysses), rescue from the darkness (Orpheus and Euridice) (4). Orpheus' image was that of the Palace ceiling, in one of the rooms, mirrored by the floor piece, which now reflects another architecture; but the name of Pombal (5) is attached to the memory of both places, to the signature of (re) construction and monumentality.

 

The wooden porch and the “bricks” scattered from the third work again absorb the signs of the place: the tallest windows and their shadow projected on a warhead; the idea of construction. Numbered until 1800 for a relocation that did not take place, and once all numbers were erased, in a prolonged restoration operation, the stones are here designated by wooden units that the artist numbers from there. The coincidence of the inauguration date of the neoclassical church, in 1802, is just another mesh in the tight symbolic siege of referencing. The 1816 fire will restart the cycle of destruction and reconstruction. Fire and water challenge the persistence of the place, with its “marks”, its requirement for purification. With them and on them the records of what happened are written, the books (6) of memory are recorded: sculptures, space, numbers, plots, shadows, mirrors, evocation.

 

1. Jean-Marc Poinsot, “In Situ, lieux et espaces de la sculpture contemporaine”, in Qu'est-ce que la sculpture moderne? Paris: Center Georges Pompidou, 1986, p. 322-329.

 

2. Paul Valéry, «Idée Fixe ou deux hommes à la mer», in Œuvres, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1988, Vol.II, pp.215-218.

 

3. At the Oeiras Palace, in 2016, one of the pieces consisted of a mesh of red threads crossed over the water of the lake. Another piece, Sala de Jogo, also incorporated extended wires, this time between chairs, evoking connections between people and playful strategies.

 

4. I refer to Maria João Gamito's text, “O Devir da Água”, in the leaflet that accompanied the exhibition, for other shades of this analogy. I also remember the play Penélope, in the same exhibition, which worked on the idea of waiting and inner travel.

 

5. At the Oeiras Palace, in 2016, one of the pieces was a large cage in which the artist superimposed the evocation of garden birds, an existing loft on the property and the Pombaline technique of building buildings “in cage”.

 

6. In the installation The Library of Muses held in the Sala do Conhecimento (Palácio de Oeiras, in 2016), brought together the nine Muses, with an artist's book for each one, inspired by the knowledge that each represents. However, a large part of these books were included in the collection of artist books in the Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.