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The arrow of time About the exhibition A moment that is repeated over and over Águas Águas Gallery, 8 in Lisbon Manuel Valente Alves Time is not seen or heard. It is situated in a mysterious way below and beyond perceptions and sensations. It has no smell or taste, does not touch, is neither hot nor cold, neither dry nor humid. However, his passage almost always leaves marks on things and beings, in the tangible reality of the world. And there are signs of time that are constructed by the human being, such as artistic and technoscientific artefacts, architecture, streets and city squares, which evoke historical times. Also the days and nights and the seasons, natural phenomena that are repeated in an infinite circularity, are the origin of many of our ideas about time. The inner time, impossible to measure, reflects aspects of human subjectivity, such as thought, love, passion, hatred ... But time itself is also an object of thought. As in this exhibition by Carla Rebelo, “A moment that is repeated continuously”, a pause in time, a kind of still that is repeated endlessly. A stop of time to reflect on it, looking at the infinite that is before and ahead of us. During this interminable pause, time becomes an object, a body that Carla Rebelo gradually dissects. Reversibility and irreversibility, finitude and restlessness, sky and earth, water and fire seem to converge in the discovery of the anatomy and physiology of time, a universe of endless and visual, semantic and other relationships and webs. In spite of the passing time, the ever faster acceleration of all kinds of speeds, this genetic work is both frozen time and time in motion, “a moment that is repeated continuously”, an archeology of knowledge, experiences, experiences and feelings. Carla Rebelo creates a totality from fragments, a time out of time that inhabits the materiality of her sculptures, the beauty of her drawings and books. There are lines that intersect and interweave, fabrics, leaves, bark… The moment that Carla Rebelo's art calls for is both an interior time, lived and eternalized, and an exterior time, delimited by history, which looks to the past and protrudes into the future. No discontinuities. As in parallel mirrors in which the self-between-mirrors multiplies into reflected images that dissolve in an endless perspective. Carla Rebelo's art is a science of continuity. Everything connects to everything. It is a slowly woven web, through which we rediscover the infinite complexity of the world, the timelessness of art. Many of the ideas made about time, nature, life are dismantled here. Like the ideas of birth and death. Birth and death do not exist in the natural world. They are pre-concepts designed to make the world intelligible, to adapt the infinite complexity of the world to the limitations of human thought. There is an infinite before us and after us, generations that succeed and connect with each other. Without being able to reveal, even in the confines of time, any cell, molecule or atom that we can designate as matrix. And death, what we call death, will only be a mere transformation of matter, a change of state. In criticisms of the big bang theory, genetic theories are often compared with myths. Which is understandable. Both genetic theories and myths seek to go back, to go back through the flow of time. Some and others try to reach the zero degree of a knowledge process that aims to make the birth of the universe, of life and of the human being intelligible. In the absence of mathematical models, myths feed on intellectual speculation. Classical science, on the other hand, focuses attention on continuous variations. Genetic processes will only begin to be addressed with the birth of embryology. As embryological processes cannot be reduced to continuous variations, given their extreme complexity, science, unable to theorize them, will, for a long time, be confined to its description. Today, genetics and problems of complexity are at the forefront of scientists' concerns, and inspire research that goes very far in the knowledge of phenomena, often linking science to art, the finite to the infinite. Life is metamorphosis, eternal metamorphosis. Between mirrors, projections of space, leaves that slowly change in texture and shape, books and sculptures, Carla Rebelo's work evokes a subjective time that projects beyond the limits of the ruler and the compass, nature and the senses, and proposes a reflection on temporality. Yours, ours, the world. An arrow of time that flies both ways, without zigzagging. We are a family owned and operated business. Manuel Valente Alves

An almost imperceptible movement that has to do with flight We are a family owned and operated business. Carla Rebelo An almost imperceptible movement that has to do with the flight is Carla Rebelo's first solo exhibition of Sculpture and Installation works in Lisbon and also this artist's first collaboration with Galeria Monumental. The artist exhibits a set of unpublished works, some of which were purposely built for the Gallery's space, and also a piece from 2010 and two from 2013. Travel is the unifying concept of this exhibition. Understood as an effective journey with everything that is discovered and found there, but also as an inner journey in territories of memory and imagination. Inserted in the project started in 2010 and called “Journey into the cities lived in”, in which the journey is the starting point to work on the memory based on the experience lived on site, a piece related to the city of Berlin and a video / sculpture and an installation connected to the city of Kronstadt in Saint Petersburg, Russia. These works follow research periods in these cities, the last of which was carried out in the context of an artistic residency through the National Center for Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg. In addition to these pieces, the aforementioned concept appears associated with two characters that by themselves condense the idea of travel in the two directions worked on in the exhibition: Penélope and Ulisses from Homer's Odyssey. Two pieces associated by formal, material and spatial positioning in the Gallery refer to these two opposing and complementary forces. Ulysses personifies the traveling warrior, the one who discovers, who opens the way, travels in space and time, changes the places he goes through, makes history, makes memory. Penelope is the opposite force. It is the character who stays and imagines, who travels in his inner world, weaves to feed his desire and does it simultaneously with a creative and destructive force, by day he weaves and at night he cuts. Its journey is interior and its territory is what builds and deconstructs it. Carla Rebelo September 2014 We are a family owned and operated business.

A Cabinet of Minimal Gestures about the exhibition According to her own time by Carla Rebelo at Galeria Diferença, in Lisbon Sofia Ponte There is no way to fix time. However, we can think about time, visualizing it in some poetic situations, such as when visiting a cabinet with minimal gestures. A cabinet that presents a sense of time from a subjective perspective, provoking emotions and moods instead of referring to visible realities. An exhibition is a social and symbolic device that defines, organizes and communicates ideas. It is a dynamic and fluctuating stage, which generates values and meanings that vary according to its context. This solo exhibition is a project by Carla Rebelo that prolongs some of the reflections developed in her last exhibition “Um Momento que Repete Continuamente” (2018). Here, too, the exhibition proposes a journey through works with a maneuverable scale where the legacy of textiles, impure minimalism and appropriation is combined in different ways, and where, in my view, principles that represent moments of great inventiveness and reflection are confirmed. The meaning of a work of art is often a matter specific to art and the contextual and conceptual framework of the exhibitions in which it is presented. To designate an object as art is to detach it from the banal context of objects and to value it according to concepts validated by a community, and it says more about the person or group of people who leads an object to a selective circuit of material things, than about the object itself. In other words, a work of art is the product of choices, decisions and circumstances of an operation that is not different from that which defines a particular object, for example, as an artifact. An object acquires the function of an aesthetic symbol or a symbol of material culture, of a given community, through culturally agreed operations and determined by social practices generated by the operating context in which these operations occur, a context that is constantly changing . It is, therefore, necessary to know and recognize the actors in this framework. Let us start with the concept of a cabinet with minimal gestures that I attribute to this proposal, and that dialogues with the architecture of Galeria Diferença that welcomes this exhibition so well. This office is a stylized space for study, rehearsal and play that incorporates natural and artificial elements. “Sala de Jogo” (2016) is, moreover, the installation that marks a double presence in this exhibition. It is a physical and mental architectural space, between real and imaginary figures, which impose context as content. This cabinet with minimal gestures thus stands between cement and glass walls, light and shadows. It has a meditative function, which in this specific case serves as an aid to thinking about the concept of time. Time doesn't really exist. It exists only when we try to understand its meaning, when we think about it. The artist was interested in thinking about the concept of "circular time" closer to the idea of "inner time" and more distant from the concept of "linear time" (which establishes a past, present and future or which organizes a day in 24 hours and hours in minutes, seconds, and so on). So “circular time” can take any form. The shapes that it takes in this cabinet are generally geometric, that is, they are juxtaposed circles, they are interconnected cones, they are wefts, they are squares and rectangles superimposed on materials such as wood, copper, textile thread, resin, aluminum, iron, paint and a series of collected objects, such as textile spools and shuttles, paper, bark and other almost imperceptible fragments. And the ideas that fill this office are ideas about simplicity that encourage the faculty of contemplation and meditation, from multiple narrative points of view. Challenged by the action of exposing her practice, the artist demonstrates that the materialization of works of art depends on symbolic designation strategies. Carla Rebelo, indicates that these objects are “devices to generate thought” for herself, and perhaps also for others. With a thoughtful predisposition, the visitor will then be able to find some of the minimal gestures that are at the origin of these works. Gestures that arise from measurable and systematic methodologies, which sometimes move smoothly, producing symmetries and visual repetitions that do not deviate from their intention: to show various perceptions of inner time. For example, the gesture of weaving plots from a "Book of Hours" that at each "turn of the page" presents a wider web in a kind of forgetfulness of woven thought. Or the “Book of the Compass of Waiting” where a lined paper is exposed to different inking times, giving rise to a chromatic rhythm that contains a random diagram of the passage of that time. Or the "Empty Hourglasses" that end all time. Thus, the artist continues to embody ideas that have neither body nor space, but that demonstrate a commitment to reflexivity, conceptual rigor and literalness. This text was organized after a visit to Carla Rebelo's studio in February 2020. A second version will be proposed after visiting the Diferença Gallery. Because the exhibitions also determine the meaning of the works, and that is the only way to share dimensions of thought that arise after interacting with the space of the works exhibited. Often referred to a secondary plan, the exposure process must be understood as an exercise in which more meanings intervene than those initially envisaged. An object on display is an object related to the intentions and concept of the artist who created the concept of the work and related to the operation of values to which it will be, and is, subject in the context of exhibition. It remains, for example, to mention the device designed by the artist to look at each of these works in light and shadow, in solitude or in company. Porto, 2 March 2020.

Excerpt from the text of the exhibition I would prefer not to, from Herman Melville's short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener. The story of Wall Street, held at Plataforma R evolver in Lisbon. Maria João Gamito We are a family owned and operated business. "Silent Books titled the book / installation by Carla Rebelo. The numbered blue sheets, from two books, about 40 cm high, densely filled with handwritten records of houses and commercial establishments supposedly in the district of Lisbon, and without any indication of origin, date or functional framework, unfold like a folio, completely filling the floor of a place of passage. Book / installation or artist's book, this piece, like all of Carla Rebelo's pieces, is a response to the question of the place. But in this case, and according to the artist's words, it is also an answer to his need to create a place for Bartleby, after all not very different from the one that the clerk inhabited in the Melville tale: a corner behind the tall, green screen in the lawyer's workroom, where he stood for a long time watching a blind wall and where he remained after removing the screen. And finally, it is a device for objectifying writing in unexpected correspondences subtly defined in the commitment of the scales and the relations they establish between the real space and that of representation, and in the understanding of the object in its etymological truth, as an obstacle or barrier placed before the eyes. The pages of the property registration books, carefully torn from the books where they once had a function, are articulated as screens or walls that prevent passage in a passage place, making the place absurd and obtuse the object that inscribes its unreason. . This unreason is both that of the real impediment to crossing the passage and that of the objectification of the written record, which, already distant from the monotonous task that copied it and immersed in the absurdity of the copy whose meaning was lost, still remains, now as a screen or metaphor on the walls of the cities that belong to two places and two times and that in both refer, not to the labyrinth where men are lost by the action of a monumental exercise of reason, but to its inverse form, that of the spreading, irrational spot and entropic. The walls of Carla Rebelo, noisy and encrypted like the walls of contemporary cities, arise from the writing material that registers them and thus allows them to access a permanence that is that of the wall as the power of the image, of all images for all men who, like Bartleby, look for them in this elementary as well as essential act of turning to a wall in return to themselves and their cause. Three walls of a place of passage is the place that Carla Rebelo found for Bartleby. In it, as in the work that precedes it, the clerk stands, facing a wall, between the book that unfolds as the perspectives in a city and the book that opens to read the city and its perspectives. " Maria João Gamito

(Dis) meeting , 2014 wood Sculpture Variable dimensions

Upcoming exhibitions Collectives Nov. 2025 Participation in the Exhibition - Carlos Bunga. Habitar a Contradição CAM - Modern Art Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation October 2025/ August 2026 Artistic Residency and Exhibition - Anatomical Theater Project Individuais Videos about the artist's work produced by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Art Library : The Library of the Muses Blind book I and II December 2025/2026 TrenAir Artistic Residency - Trencin 2026 European Capital of Culture Slovakia 2027 National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon