carla rebelo
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.