LIFE IS AN ENTANGLEMENT is the second exhibition resulting from the partnership between zet gallery and the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. The selection of the artists was made from the participants in the 2019 edition of GA-AB (Open Galleries) by a jury composed of Joana Meneses Fernandes (Braga Culture 2030 project coordinator), Miguel Bandeira Duarte (Nogueira da Silva Museum), Luís Coquenão (visual artist) and by Helena Mendes Pereira (curator at zet gallery). The common thread of this curatorship project came from Lorenzo Bordonaro’s (b.1971) work: a site specific installation in red trap that creates a web or net effect and encourages us to uphold an ergonomic posture in order to experience it, transforming itself into a kind of meditative cocoon representing our inner entanglements, the complexity of the journey which we call life and is made up of human relations, encounters and missed encounters, vortices and whirlwinds, of winning and losing, and therefore, a tangle of contradictions, advances and setbacks.
The works of these artists are presented in a scheme of networks (compartmentalized and open) and in a visual and conceptual contagion, of different emotional appeals, that bring us closer to both their and our inner worlds as well as to our memories and stories. A clear example of this approach is Lígia Fernandes’ (b.1985) proposal that explores, through a breach in gesture and expression painting about the volatility of paper, the condition of memory, eternalized in family photo albums. From her statement, we would quickly reach Ana Lúcia Ventura’s (b.1996) gestural space of landscape, Hugo Castilho’s (b.1995) material and ironic density and Alberto Rodrigues Marques’ (b.1995) incessant plastic research, considering that these last two trace an interesting path between a kind of free, dead or detailed figuration, and the preponderance of color as a means of action and communication. Alberto Rodrigues Marques engages in painting on an open field, holding interest in the possible responses that the industry and devices can add to plastic production as it grows in scale, while simultaneously becoming minimal in register and questioning the images. And what may one say about Francisco Lourenço’s (b.1991) video work, almost surreal narratives that, at some point, lead us to the advantageous creative partnership between Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) and Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), in a 4.0 version of intense visual poetry?
We now begin to study the nomadic forms to return to Ana Sofia Sá’s (b.1997) process of observing nature, which is based on sculptural sensibility and drawing and takes us back to the school furniture, which we refer to as the lab of the future. This time, there is a book that we are driven to discover, in a window that opens up to a dilution of the contemplative barriers imposed on the viewer through painting and that, in the case of sculpture or the third dimension of the artwork, intensifies the central dualism of the tendency presented between spirit and nature, in a constant return to Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and to the wealth of assumptions that the everyday offers for creation, being indelible, the influences of land art or art povera as phenomenologies of the apotheosis of the desacralization of the artistic model and its stripping in terms of intrinsic material value.
Reading is fundamental in understanding the proposals of André Costa (b.1975), Carlos Filipe Cavaleiro (b.1994), Joana Lapin (b.1998), Pablo Quiroga (b.1990) and Segismundo (b.1984), which are all organic, industrial, ironic and at the same time, full of political action and revolution. We present them as a game, an anti-map, a battlefield, and a challenge to the struggle of classifications of the prejudices of taste judgment that is assumed when one chooses, contextualizes and exposes oneself, in other words: heals. More than subjectivity, contemporary art belongs to sheer intersubjectivity: it belongs to the individual, even though we sometimes search for unison and collective acceptance.
The lightness of Joana Paiva Sequeira’s (b.1997) sculptures and her subtle delicate processes bring us back to the initial color of the entanglement, this time compact, remaining nevertheless textile. When we sometimes find ourselves roaming through the indecipherable paths of what is abstract and what is figure, what is process or what is result, what is concept or what is matter and technique, the 13 artists who make up the exhibition LIFE IS AN ENTANGLEMENT offer us consistency of demand and boldness from within.
LIFE IS NA ENTANGLEMENT is yet another daring effort to make art a motto and motive to get an inner scope, untie the knots that take our breath away and tie those which are our safe haven and do us good. LIFE IS AN ENTANGLEMENT is a reaffirmation of our commitment to reinforce the belief that art can, in the same way we can, change the world.
Helena Mendes Pereira
zet gallery’s chief curator
