DAYANA LUCAS

CIFRA

30 September 2023 to April 2024

The ancients used the entrails of animals to communicate with the gods. The Latin term for this art of decipherment was "haruspice" - which means the inspection of entrails or the revelation of that which is not immediately apparent. The modern perception of our existence is based on reality as an abyss, labyrinth or fold - that which Drummond de Andrade called the "clear enigma" of language.

Between opacity and transparency, between the visible and the invisible, exploring the nuances of a path that has two extremes, Dayana Lucas (born in 1987 in Caracas; lives and works in Porto) elevates the act of inscribing, graphing, drawing to ritual. There is an initiatory dimension to her gesture, in which drawing is like a machine for seeing and feeling. The invention of a never-ending line, in Dayana Lucas’ work, explores not only the closure of the gesture, but also its beginnings, since the imagination gives shape to a thread that is constantly starting over, without either beginning or end - an ideal suspension of death.

Faced with the current impoverishment of language, signs and flat, algorithmisable messages, this exhibition highlights the desire to retreat from that which has already been said. We could even say that it seeks to surrealise things. The heart of the exhibition is the glass house, an (in)decipherable nodal point that harbours enigma. Synonymous with protection and delicacy at the same time, the glass house can mean being naked within ourselves. It is where the artist makes her fragility (and her strength) visible.

The group of works and interventions on display at the CIAJG highlight the artist’s transition from drawing to three-dimensional form, and how she has been influenced by music and solitary landscapes. Visitors to this exhibition can thereby sense the transformation of drawing into sculpture, into a transparent house, without any mediation. We are the house. We have no glass ceilings.

BÁRBARA FONTE

THE MOST TACTLESS CANDOUR

"The most tactless candour" is the title of Bárbara Fonte's video and drawing project. The video installation presents a succession of performative actions filmed in the studio, which the artist calls "intimate performances", since they have been directed and recorded autonomously, using the scenic and technical resources available in the studio. The human figure is the central element and acts according to a series of defined actions that explore (in the sense of trial and error) the ideas of falling, descending, horizontality as a place for heroes/heroines and, at the same time, humanity. Bárbara Fonte comments: "If the movement of falling always seems to echo the vulnerability of the body, how can the act of descent be transformed into power? The falling body is moving and disturbing, but fragile, pious, human. Perhaps the hostile disturbance of the fall can extend beyond historical-religious reminiscences. Perhaps desire, disposition, appetite and ambition will foster power in horizontality. Perhaps the lying "fossil" body, the crushing, the abandonment, will be overcome by the incarnation of the dream, the erotic, transit, humanisation, animalisation. Perhaps lethargy and softness will be undone by provoking the place of fears, the excavation of shadows, the exploration of the cave of secrets."

CLÁUDIA CIBRÃO

IMMATERIAL PAINTING

"Immaterial Painting", by Cláudia Cibrão, is an installation that investigates her own shadow and projected shadow. The title assumes a dichotomy between the tangible and incorporeal. If, on the one hand, the immaterial is generally associated with abstract and spiritual elements, which are not formed of matter and therefore cannot be touched, and can be dances, crafts, celebrations, literature or language, everything that is not concrete such as habits, forms of expression and rituals, shadows or reflections, on the other hand, the material has other types of properties. Painting, for example, can be considered to be material. As a tangible support, with a surface and paint, it has texture, body, colour, pigment and density. At the limits of artistic practice, "Immaterial Painting" is a proposal that goes to the heart of this binomial and experiments with a play of shadows and reflections that, in the artist's words, seeks to "embrace the impasse between a traditional view of painting and the challenges of digital media, comprising an exhaustion of rigid boundaries between artistic areas".

GUACHE

TWO-WAY IMPROVISATION

"Two-way improvisation" is an improvisation environment with voice processing, electronic and percussive devices and microphone control.  The experimental music duo Guache composes music based on their own sound territory, and explores interaction with chance, non-tempered melodies, non-verbal vocal performativity, texture, noise, drone and movement of sound in the stereophonic spectrum. They create an immersive atmosphere through dialogue between the soundscape and the video installation that demarcates the installation at the CIAJG - a distorted projection in two planes of a photo-research work. A look at the interference of time and space in sound and visual events.

LUCAS CARNEIRO AND MANUEL COSTA

HIC SVNT SERPENS

The serpent, which conveys a deep and complex symbolic charge, is represented in the most varied geographic regions and cultural manifestations, and has accompanied humanity from its most primitive forms. The Iberian peninsula is no exception. From the ancient Ophiussa to legends and folk tales, the Iberian peninsula has many mythological relationships with the serpent, manifested in different phenomena and chronologies. Evoking the serpent of the Castro de Troña hilltop fort and its legend, we propose an interaction with these spaces and narratives using a famous mobile phone game. We thereby recognise the places of this mythography of the Iberian peninsula which, overlapping virtual and cartographic elements, moves from digital abstraction to concrete locations. The game is also a primitive digital remnant, a vestige of an electronic archaeology that represents both a fascinating technological advance and its equally fascinating vanishing process. The serpent, as a metaphorical image, mediates the dialogue between history and myth, stone and microchip, game and representation. The aim of this ensemble is to reflect on the concept of heritage and the continuous erosion of technology, based on the map as a valuable instrument of organisation and control to contemporary technological devices, the multifunctional and ubiquitous tools of everyday life. HIC SVNT SERPENS is based on an adaptation of the famous Latin expression (Hic Svnt Dracones - here there are dragons), that featured on the first European cartographies indicating the beginning of the unknown, uncertain, mythological and fantastic realms. Here, they don't show dragons, but rather Iberian serpents imbued with the same mysterious mists.

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In exhibition until 28 January 2024

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