It is with great pleasure that we announce RES, Pedro Pascoinho's third solo show at the gallery!

OPENING
Thursday,  September 19th | 7 - 10 PM
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DURATION
19.09  - 09.11.2024

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The image as intimacy and mystery

The image is absolutely dominant in Pedro Pascoinho's work, specifically in his figurative approach. This statement needs further elaboration, however, because Pascoinho's figuration is unique and complex. In fact, the set of drawings presented in this exhibition, in their greyish colouring, detail and evocation of 19th century times, take us back to the origins of photography in the 1920s, namely with the work of Nicéphore Niépce. Jonathan Crary, in his well-known work Techniques of the observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century (1990), considers that ‘(...) there is a reorganisation of the observer in the nineteenth century before the appearance of photography. (...) In a sense, what occurs is a new valorisation of the visual experience, which is given unprecedented mobility and interchangeability, abstracted from any founding place or referent’. 

The orifice of the camera obscura, known since antiquity and developed in the Renaissance, and then the camera, marked the beginning of looking at the world in an intimate, that is, fractured and solitary way. The place from which the artist peers signalled a positioning of the private relationship with what he wanted to see. And so we continue in the photographic matrix. Pedro Pascoinho's drawings incorporate this matrix. At a glance, we could be looking at photographs from an album lost in time. But a new problem arises. Photographs from the 19th century sought to formally imitate painting in their rigour of framing, composition and balance, i.e. the oldest imagery referent, in the belief of a certain artistic legitimacy. The magnificent photographs of William Fox Talbot, Gustave Le Gray, Félix Nadar, Étienne Carjat, Mathew Brady and Margaret Cameron in the mid-19th century materialised this quest. But Pedro Pascoinho's rigorous drawings nevertheless present a disjointed figuration, visible in cut-out objects, enlarged details, bodies with missing heads or halved animals. This aspect is absolutely disturbing and disruptive, precisely because it aborts any hypothesis of a classicist figuration, towards which an initial vision could lean. So we are left with the intimacy of the gaze, the perplexity of silence, the difficulty of circumscribing, not least because everything still opens up to an out-of-field by extending the objects indefinitely in space. What remains is the poetic beauty of the image in its mystery, complexity and virtuosity.

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PEDRO PASCOINHO

RES
19.09 - 09.11.2024
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Text : Isabel Nogueira
Exhibition photography : Bruno Lopes 
Video : João Silva
Editing : Pedro Canoilas