do espiritual na arte (# 06)

pedro cabrita reis, the passage oh the hours, 2004


pedro cabrita reis, absent names, 2003


(excerto de uma entrevista de adrian searle a pedro cabrita reis / www.pedrocabritareis.com)

PCR: Well… I am a gatherer of memories, mostly.
AS: Yours or other people’s?
PCR: Good question. Mine eventually, because everything I work with becomes my experience. It comes to me through memories, sounds, lost things, shadows. I am a gatherer of mysteries, signs of passage… It is like if you are in a hurricane, which is sucking up all the shit: houses, roofs, cars. And when the wind stops it deposits all this stuff and goes off somewhere else, leaving behind what looks like a chaotic archaeological site… which we will reconstruct and shape again and again. Why worry about who made this or that or whom does that belong to? My work has to do with things being unique to one person. It’s about how to remain or what will remain. Survival? Order after chaos? Trying to make sense? A deep, profound desire to maintain one’s self alive, perhaps.

(…)

AS: Why do you think this kind of subject matter has become such a preoccupation? One can trace this focus on architecture through so many artists’ work of the past half century.

PCR: Because nature has disappeared as a reference. We have lost it within ourselves to such a point that we came to the moment where the exercise of architecture is the only form that makes the world comprehensible. After all, architecture is more about defining territories then actually building houses. Being an artist, what I do evolves around architecture as a mental discipline or an exercise of reality, since it’s impossible even to look at a tree without considering it as a part of an elevation that includes my shadow, the line of the horizon, the space between both and the drawing of the steps or of the walk in between those points. And then again here we are talking about space, wich is again architecture, which leads us both to the loss of Nature and – why not? – to the fall of God. It has always been, as it were, against the trees. The world is meaningless unless you define it through a drawing. We have to shape the form of the world.

AS: It is difficult to think of this without feelings of loss and sadness, about nature and our place within it.

PCR: I would say that melancholia is the word we are missing here. Melancholia considered as the condition of being deprived of an external image of the self. Having lost the comfortable reassurance of being part of Nature, we are only left with the perception of the self. And this knowledge implies the drawing of a territory, shall I say an exercise of architecture, an assumption of a self that builds a sense of place. Shaping a form of a wall, opening doors and windows in it, is how one can deal with the landscape which is difficult to be perceived if not through the intersection of a line with another line. Those two create a space where the projection of our shadow is the measuring tool. Or, if you prefer, the reference of a finally regained unity.

AS: I understand your work as not about revolutionary gestures and schism, but about continuities.

PCR: The loss of nature is a wound, still, or forever, to be closed. To be healed. Only artists can do it; in a manner, I suppose, very desperate. I’m not interested in the ephemeral brilliance of those moments of rupture. Instead, I’m further more interested or implied in a gesture of re-building. I’m more interested in the act of doing. Putting things together, establishing a place of memory as an ability to construct. Memory as opposite to nostalgia. I would like my work to be referred to as an inner space of silence, introspection, serenity. Most of all it’s about the inevitable quest for beauty, as a form of absolute inteligence.
(…)