Reflections in Water

In an interview carried out in 2007 and published in the catalogue for the exhibition “Relações Formais”[1] presented by Rui Sanches at the Casa da Cerca, Emília Ferreira asked the artist, “When is a piece finished?” On the one hand, this question is rhetorical in terms of the way in which we observe an artist’s work: the exhibited work has already been finished. On the other hand, however, it might be considered as dialectical in the artist’s own process.

Rui Sanches reposes the question in his answer, revealing that he recognises that the work is autonomous when it is freed of its objectual condition, in that it externalises and presents itself as a subject that challenges him. The meaning of this interpellation is ambiguous. On the one hand, it defines a state of the work as a double dialogue: firstly with its creator and his process, and secondly with the viewer, who is present. Moreover, it can open up a range of possibilities that the artist takes as a starting point, reinterpreting the finalised work in another context. In the same way as when a text is taken up and written starting from its matrix, taking the model as a procedure for reinscription.

This exhibition by Rui Sanches, held at Appleton Square and entitled Reflections in Water, challenges us to discover the transitions and reflections in the artist’s practice, who does not lose sight of a marked focus of his research on sculptural procedures which are set out in the installation on the ground floor and the diptychs in the downstairs room. In the main room, Sanches questions the exhibition space without altering it, introducing a second space that transforms its taxonomy, and the relationships evoked by its scale and proportion, returning to a work, an installation that was shown for the first time in a group exhibition under the general title of “O Sonho de Wagner” (“Wagner’s Dream”), held in 2012 in one of the rooms in the Plataforma Revólver space.

This piece, entitled Reflections in Water (2014) remains true to the material and sensory vocabulary that characterised the earlier installation. However, its earlier incarnation has now become a model that the artist revisits in a poetic and shameless interplay between the practice of art in the studio and the memory of other models that the sculptor’s work has sedimented, comprising the different moments of his processes without paying tribute to the apparently justified finalisation. The installation is a space inside another space, but there is no sense of intrusion due to the sculptural and reflective element that reconnects the two gallery spaces, establishing a close relationship with the built architecture and the architecture in the sense of the sculptural thinking that imprints the movement of the body within the space.

The diptychs exhibited in the downstairs room are works on paper. Drawings and photographs printed on cotton paper, in two formats, which highlight the artist’s examination of the pre-existence of the model and the work carried out in the studio. We may interpret these as inner landscapes, as images of another place. However, Rui Sanches uses the photographic image as a fragmentary record of a three-dimensional composition gradually constructed through his long ongoing work. Thus time is an element that is owned by the sculpture and the relationship between the model and the moment at which it gives way to another work that unfolds in the wake of the diptychs. The drawings take over from the photographic imagery, coming later, and seem to replicate organic or geometric shapes, contrasts of light and overlapping in an almost credible contradiction between two languages placed side by side. Drawing emerges in its austere autonomy, constructing and dissecting the visual memory of the printed image. What we see in the photographic image is mirrored by a reinterpretation that welcomes the motion of the hand and the steadiness of the line chosen, but extricates itself from any duplication, protecting the memory of its referent. The work is involved in a process of recognition and reinvents itself through every decision that the artist makes between the instant recording and the persistent act of sculpture, as well of that of drawing, which the motion of the body experiences.

The “reflections in water” are almost always an enchanted glimpse that may obnubilate what is actually offered to be seen.

João Silvério
September 2014

[1] See the interview between Rui Sanches and Emília Ferreira, in “Rui Sanches- Relações Formais”, exhibition catalogue, Casa da Cerca – Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Almada, 2007, p. 22.