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LIFELINE SERIES
part of the curated project THE GAME OF LOGIC by Ana Matos (Salgadeiras Gallery) at JUSTMAD 2019
The game of Logic
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here ?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “
Alice in the Wonderland”, Lewis Carroll
Beneath her foot-stool, Science groans in Chains,
And Wit dreads Exile, Penalties and Pains.
There foam’d rebellious Logic, gagged and bound,
There, stript, fair Rhet’ric languish’d on the ground.
“The Dunciad“, Alexander Pope
We’ve always been familiar with Lewis Carroll’s smiling cat, his forever-late white rabbit, and Ms Alice, a brave and curious girl who, when going down a hole, is taken to a different reality, her own wonderland. The absurd, the irony, the social critique to Victorian age, and its twisted, less obvious, and elaborate, logic, full of puns and wordplay, make this book, first published in England in 1865, to figure among today’s icons of nonsense, and one of the most read books ever. It has been adapted to film, the stage, and to even lesser known areas, such as AI technology, where its dialog sequences are used to convey notions of function, semantics, recursion, iteration, among others. This more mathematical side of the work, of Logic, is explored further in the book “The Game of Logic”, which we’ve borrowed for this exhibition. Not a novel nor poetry, it is instead an instruction manual for a game, made up by Carroll himself, which uses interactivity - in a time where the concept was not yet developed as such, nor it had material application in the arts – to bring the player/reader/spectator to perform its propositions through a set of symbols and their negations. To these propositions the game adds other complexities: subjects, terminology, things/nouns, attributes/adjectives, thus showing us other ways of saying the world. In the preface to its first edition, Lewis Carroll quotes from Alexander Pope’s poem “The Dunciad” (“There foam’d rebellious Logic, gagged and bound”) to warn us, from the very beginning, what he’s aiming at, in the Age of Lights: to bring Logic back its role and relevance in how we make sense of the world.
In this exhibition, propositions, symbols and their meanings, nouns, tools are of a different nature, even though they intersect each other in this game of logic Cláudio Garrudo, Rui Horta Pereira and Rui Soares Costa are inviting us to play. Each with his own particular lexicon, they have been working on different thresholds to their areas of expression, from photography to painting, from drawing to sculpture, or Philosophy. Here, they are drawing us into the rabbit hole, into Alice’s magical labyrinth, where logic and reason take on different shapes. Cláudio Garrudo’s “Trinus 1142” is the outcome of an artistic residency aboard a cargo ship, where “the sea - [which] is the desert in liquid form” -” [“Sobre a esfera impossível e o azul” , Gonçalo M. Tavares, 2018, our translation]. It gives us the thrill of illusion, and it questions us on its referential, on where it stands, on where we stand. In order to reach the exit, as in a mirror-house, do we go up or down? “Which way should I go?”, asks Alice .
In his tri-dimensional works Rui Horta Pereira explores the drawing-made-object and tempts us to go down these “Wells/Poços”, made of lines, shapes, colour, and paper, in intertwined composition, in some kind of – in his own words - “poetic gravity”. This series, along with “Borrões”, is built upon a set of premises, evidences, formal, metaphorical, from where Alice seems to say “the well makes an echo”. The works in Rui Soares Costa’s “Lifeline Series” are like seismometers to his own body, representing and recording his bio-rhythmic variations and bodily performances that diverge from the line. They are portraits of different moments in a (seeming) paradox between the abstract and the representational. The lines never meet, they have only short interruptions, pauses, in an equation with controlled parameters. Alice seems to hesitate and her heartbeat goes faster in an ever-going line.
It all depends, after all, a good deal on where you want to get to.
Ana Matos
Lisbon, February 2019
February 26 - March 3, 2019
JUSTMAD
Neptune Palace
Madrid, ES