My mother taught me like this: when we cross a street and the driver of the passing car stops for us to cross, you never say thank you. It's the driver's obligation to stop. Pedestrians have priority. 

It's a right. You never thank for your right.”

18/6/15

Adília Lopes

These notes begin with a poem by Adília Lopes, which ends with a phrase that could palm streets.

Seemingly banal gestures, like the one described by the poet, taught by her mother, that take on a political charge invariably disguised by haste and blind glances.

Tenderness seems to have left the lexicon of our body which, these days, and looking back, seems to (re)affirm the necessary fusion with politics. 

Be kind rewind takes us there. To an encounter that makes us reflect on time, and on how by its passage, we can map affinities. Affinity is not synonymous with similarity. Affinity can also play on difference. What is important is that we surrender ourselves to time - an attitude that consists in rehearsing ways of welcoming the other, which can be practiced at the bus stop, or by stopping for someone to cross the road.

While looking at the group of works that make up the exhibition, I realized that there is a calligraphic and sonorous affinity shared between the words risk, scratch, and resist. 

To risk, which shares something with the notion of resisting, and which can unfold into another action, giving birth to yet another verb - to scratch. To scratch in time. The three verbs, in my reading, run through the exhibition and trace connections between the artists' proposals - some through technical affinity, others through the distance in the choice of supports -, but that, after all, scratch and risk each other in an endless affinity. 

More than anything, these notes propose that we follow the path of the child, one who leaves a trail, a line of tenderness behind her, scratching the surface of the earth with her feet so that the next one, if she chooses to give herself to this time I am talking about, can follow in her footsteps, scratching___ out a deep intelligence that I like to call tenderness.

 

The woman who stands naked, lying on a table, is ready to be eaten. To be served. This woman is a fetish. She extends an invitation: to have her flesh subtracted so that she can fit into the standard of beauty she never chose. In 2002, Ana Pérez-Quiroga presented a performance that a posteriori resulted in the piece we can see today in the gallery, I hate being fat, eat me please. Going back and forth in time from twenty years ago, something remains - the need for us women to keep resisting and taking risks to build a better legacy for those who will come after. Something we cannot do alone, without the experience of tenderness and affinity to which I refer. That the house, an emancipated theme in Ana Pérez-Quiroga's work, may be a space for creation, that it may mean today a space of rupture with the old, and that in it, the china may break and undo imprisoned consciences, serving them, with tenderness and on an exquisite tablecloth, a free and renewed banquet.

Emancipation, resistance, is also a theme that occupies Ophelia, a female character in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet, which can be seen in Magda Delgado's work (Pop-up-scroll-down Ophelia, 2014). Throughout the English playwright's play Ophelia is oppressed by male figures: Hamlet, who despises her most of the time, saying terrible things to her; her father, Polonius, a figure of moral oppression who imparts to her duties and precepts to which a young woman should be committed. 

After Hamlet murdered Polonius in an act of madness, Ophelia took away the one thing she had power over in 16th/17th century society, where women were not allowed, for example, to perform in the theater, which led Shakespeare, and others, to put men to play the female roles. 

The image of Ophelia dead in the lake where she chose to take her life, surrounded by water lilies, is famous. 

Magda Delgado, however, places the character out of her usual place, another fetish. In place of the perverse beauty surrounding her corpse floating in the lake beneath the willow tree, Magda Delgado places Ophelia in a void where she can be seen and not confused with the docile and beautiful flowers. Ophelia has a voice, diving into the deep black submerged, perhaps, by the drawing that Pedro Pascoinho presents us in the passage from the surface to the depths in Unstable (2019). 

Here the verb changes slightly, and to resist mixes with the scratched waters that the artist presents us with, painted in oil. Carlos Mensil's resistance test (Study for resistance test I, 2022), already on the lower floor, collaborates with the tests given above. Resistance here seems to be a test of matter - the affinity for dissimilarity. The base of the sculpture presented by Mensil, holds something that leads us to consider the qualities of weight and lightness and sets us to reflect, due to the title of the piece - to follow the trail of the word allied to the body of matter wrapped in illusion. A thing that is one thing but seems to be another, an activity that qualifies the universe of children - recalling the enchantments with which I wanted to confront us at the beginning of this journey. 

By playing, the child ____risks connections, erasures, meridians, for us, a test of the ability to still be deluded by magic tricks. A tension, between real and imagined, that just as in Mensil, is given to us by the force of matter, which also appears in Gema Ruperez's work, Meridian, 2018. The artist creates a line of mesmerizing tension, a line that moves powered by the force of the body and gravity.

Following the coordinates of space, Carlos Arteiro takes us along a trail of marble sculptures (Testa, 2015). The blue scratches in the stone, which could be traces left by Pedro Pascoinho, on the floor above, underline that we are all in contact because we live, no matter the year, the media, the geography there is always a connection given to see, especially if we stand on the feet of that child who watches the magician attentively and risks getting lost - or following his mother's teachings, even if in the first moment of listening she doesn't understand them -, hence it is necessary to rewind, to cross the road, years later. 

The trail of Arteiro leads us to the work of Pablo Barreiro. In Untitled, (Approximation Series) (2019), Barreiro gives us a look at the negative of things in plaster casts. The approach he offers us to the reverse of things can perhaps be equated to the emptiness in which Ophelia is emancipated, also in the work of Magda Delgado. With a work that crosses the territory of sculpture and drawing, Barreiro's work, like Arteiro's, Mensil's and Ruperez's, can be read as a gesture of tenderness applied to matter and objects. A negative turned positive. Affirming. Or affinity through dissimilarity.

In the works of Filipe Cortez and Keke Vilabelda, the skin is not that of the body, but that of the canvas, as Cortez suggests in Untitled, Skin of the Canvas (2022). The scratches of Keke Vilabelda's DRIFT (2016) seem to coincide with what we have seen so far - the verbs scratching into each other, as does his work Cracking Layers (2020), which seems to approach Filipe Cortez's skin and the idea that gravity can reconcile tenderness with strength - just like our bodies. our skin.

Being alive is risky. 

The Canetas - half feather and cross on the butt (2015), shows a real body, drawn, photographed, copied, confused, we don't really know. We will never know everything, but we risk knowing. 

I admit: it wasn't Santa Claus that I liked. What I liked was the idea of Santa Claus. 

I never believed in Santa Claus. In magic though, I did.

BE KIND REWIND

Ana Pérez-Quiroga, Carlos Mensil, Carlos Arteiro, Filipe Cortez, Gema Rupérez, Magda Delgado, Keke Vilabelda, Pedro Pascoinho, Pablo Barreiro
24.11.2022 – 13.01.2023
_
Exhibition Text : Rita Anuar
Photography : Bruno Lopes 
Video : João Silva