No concept, Central Station

Antonio Cerveira Pinto
No concept, Central Station, #12, 2014
Digital photography
46 x 69 cm

Memento mori: white paintings

by ANTONIO CERVEIRA PINTO

Statement for a future buyer

This art piece contains 19 digital photographs plus 19 phenomenologies (paintings). Each of these 38 elements is an autonomous entity of a logical family.

It is the nature of this artwork that its site specific paintings, that will be in place for less than one month, as if they were white flowers, are for sale as well as the photographs that belong to cyberspace in the first place. What would an art lover, a collector, a museum have in return for those ephemeral paintings? Nothing. Nothing that could replace those nineteen paintings once they disappear. As a compensation for this loss I would write an essay for the art lover only, where I will say things about these paintings and the room where they were born and died. 

No concept, Central Station responds to an unexpected challenge: to show one or more artworks in what used to be a post office floor. I was offered a small 5x2.4 meters empty room and two walls to display whatever I wanted to show.

Antonio Cerveira Pinto
No concept, Central Station, #4, 2014
Digital photography
46 x 69 cm

This transitional space is a metaphor in itself. The building is changing, as art is changing too. Once upon a time there were people living and working in that room. They left but let aura everywhere. I could see it, and I began wandering about ghosts and memory imprints like the many stains on the walls in what used to be a Post Office Central Station.

I took photos at the site and I looked at them in my home-studio over and over again. Then I realized that showing those pictures inside the ex-office room, and over the walls that have been for years the architectural environment for so many, would be nice but too literary. Photography to me is only an instrumental tool. Not and end in itself. I'm a relational artist that prefer both complexity and immediacy to narrative. I appreciate pictures as double-bind challenges, black-boxes, silence, emptiness. Assuming art as a way to a prolonged sensitive and logic experience is not popular, but that's the kind of play I like.

I have choosen 19 photographs from the many I shot. I posted them on a Tumblr page called art as no idea. Then I did 19 white paintings in situ, exactly with the same size of the photographs. Each one have a subtle presence, reacting to natural light coming from the north or reflected by south oriented facades from other buildings, hopefully surviving the dim light of the corridors. The Sunlight has to cross two dusty windows to enter the room. For those that once lived and worked in that room those white auratic ghosts would probably evoke memories, as if these whites shapes were time capsules. For those uneducated visitors that will eventually come to the pop-up show, these nineteenth white rectangles would probably look like unfinished business. For those acquainted with conceptual art, these nineteenth wall inscriptions, that I also call phenomenologies, will possibly help to reignite old and new discussions.

Closing this brief explanation of the artwork I made for Central Station I must highlight the fact that I find the decision of publishing the site-specific photographs on a digital cloud —as part of the installation— a kind of post-contemporary split probably common today but that still needs to be fully incorporated in the art process.

Exhibition: Mostra '14
10-17 July, 2014
Opening: 9 July, 6 pm
Central Station, Pr Dom Luís I, Lisboa

Antonio Cerveira Pinto
No concept, Central Station, #10, 2014
Digital photography
46 x 69 cm

Online photographs: art as no idea

[Post no blogue CHICOTE]

No concept, Central Station— nas palavras do autor, a nuvem é composta por 38 elementos: 19 pinturas in situ + 19 fotografias digitais online. Cada um dos elementos é uma entidade autónoma, mas faz parte de uma só família lógica.

No concept, Central Station é a resposta a um desafio improvável: exibir uma ou mais obras de arte no que fora em tempos um pequeno gabinete de trabalho de uma central de correios. A sala tem cerca de 10mq e as duas paredes do corredor que lhe dá acesso medem de largo, respetivamente, 347 e 609 cm.

A sala tem uma janela virada a Norte, da qual se veem traseiras, empenas e fachadas de outros edifícios, algumas das quais, pela sua proximidade, refletem a luz do sul. Imagino, escreve o autor, que esta paisagem tenha ficado gravada na memória de todos os que ali trabalharam. E continua: fotografei a sala exaustivamente, tendo posteriormente escolhido dezanove imagens sintomáticas daquele lugar agora vazio. Estas imagens estão disponíveis apenas numa página Tumblr. Na sala e nas duas paredes de corredor, entretanto, pintei dezanove retângulos com as mesmas medidas das fotografias: 46 x 69 cm. Estes retângulos de cor branca são uma espécie de aura das imagens, dos quadros e das fotografias que um dia potencialmente cobriram parcialmente as paredes daquele ex-gabinete. Estes quadros brancos, que assinalam simultaneamente a ausência e a presença de algo que já não existe, são uma fenomenologia daquele lugar.

Por fim, afirma António Cerveira Pinto, embora eu possa descrever a obra desta maneira, o importante mesmo é a experiência da mesma, seja o que isto possa querer dizer a cada um dos que a virem e experimentarem.