Rui Soares Costa - Visual Artist - Exhibitions - 2016 - Sweet Series

7 - 31 January 2016

National Museum of Natural History and Science
Lisbon, PT

Opening
7 January
7pm

Finissage
28 January
7pm
release of exhibition catalog

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SWEET SERIES

Sweet series gravitates around the concept of time and its relation with memory. If painting tends to be an atemporal discourse, immutable and imune to the idea of time, these pieces take time as a working tool. Instead of looking at memory as a container where elements are stored associated with a given moment in time, memory processes are generally reconstructive and context dependent. Memory can be seen not as a time container but as a set of processes that are built on time and that use time to take form. These paintings are a memory of a process, an open continuum. Time is incorporate to make temporal and mutable paintings.

The Sweet series starting point are organic materials (wood and sugar) to which varnish is added to produce pieces that are living entities. These are paintings that evolve with the passage of time. Following a life cycle, paintings are born, they have a life and eventually they will die. The slow rhythm of the change makes the scale of the aging human. These evolving paintings are different today from what they were in the past, and what they will be in the future.

The work presented here derives from an equation with a predefined set of parameters. As in any attempt to produce an elegant equation, parsimony is a key element. Several of the parameters are kept constant so that one can observe the interaction with the others. Size and support are the same, plywood on a wooden frame with 200 X 140 X 5 cm. The materials are always, and only, sugar and varnish. The parameter “type of varnish” is kept constant with the use of maritime varnish (with the exception of a piece in which two types of varnish are used). Variation takes place with the parameters “sugar quantity”, “sugar type” and “varnish quantity”, controlling the saturation of varnish in which the sugar is embedded.

The Sweet series have an original soundtrack by André Gonçalves. Making use of his Musica Eterna, André creates an immersive organic atmosphere to go along with the experience of the ever changing paintings. Musica Eterna is made so that it never repeats itself. It uses a set of pre-determined elements that are compiled by a software to create an endless and always different soundtrack. Each moment is absolutely ephemeral. The paintings will evolve, the soundtrack will follow the metamorphoses. And will keep playing for eternity.

The combination of the Sweet paintings with Musica Eterna will transport us to organic and ethereal abstract landscapes.