Rui Macedo

The basic condition of this exhibition resides in the equation between the architecture of a particular space – gallery, building (and its functions as a museum, an archive or others) – with painting (content and montage). In this sense it is a site specific project. The strategic arrangement provides a conditioned and conditioning visibility because of its incompleteness and spatial decentralization, because of the accumulation of pieces and, especially, because of the reference to the cabinet d’amateur. The conceptual intention is to destabilize the place usually occupied by the spectator, that is, it questions the conventional coordinates in front of the work. The gaps and displacement of the paintings leaning against the wall here serve to define – another – viewing place and propose other discourses, other readings apart from those that already exist in the museological context and in the usual art circuits. Specific intertextual regimens participate in the different paintings: quotation, appropriation and allusion become camouflage strategies that take as their reference the great genres of the history of painting. In conceptual terms, the mise-en-abîme and the mise-en-scène structure imagetic contents and propose plays of recognition. The representation of the frame is a device that makes it possible to accentuate the conceptual objective of the installation. The frame establishes separation. In its genesis, it is the actual separation, the place that limits or delimits the sacred, that calls to itself (because of the composition) or the place of the whole, integral finished work. The installation of some paintings at specific spots on the walls attempts to simulate a gap. Used here into a strategy to question the observer’s “traditional” point of view, the gap also challenges what are considered to be the privileged points where paintings are located. The sensation of incompleteness of the installation is the result of the specific layout and the suggestion of a gap that is established in the simulation of the frontier between the floor and the wall, which conditions the perception of horizontality and verticality. Just like the gap, the fragmentation and displacement to which some of the “framed” pieces are submitted highlight the field of opposites whole/fragment, centre/off-centre, balance/imbalance.