Et sic in infinitum

The Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva Foundation’s 2023 programming opened with José Pedro Croft’s Et sic in infinitum, an exhibition that is almost completely composed of works that were created over the past two years and explore the complexity and manifold potentialities of the relationships between sculpture, drawing and engraving, techniques he employs, resulting in an exciting exercise in aesthetic and interpretative freedom.

Each of the works reveals elements of circles or full circles, in wider or partial planes, subjected to chromatic variations, to off-cuts and superimpositions, in order to configure forms that are unaligned and distributed, seeking mismatches, fruitful deviations, often articulating their two-dimensional and three-dimensional qualities. Thus, starting from the same basic and archetypal form, the artist explores an immense field of aesthetic and perceptive possibilities, through a succession of permutations that investigate the volatility and impermanence of forms, manifesting his inclination for more open and multiple ways of thinking, seeing and creating. He commits himself to the opportunities that derive from experimentation and creative variation, also understood as a fundamental criteria in the multiform relationship with the world and art of our time.

The title Et sic in infinitum is a quote from the phrase written on either side of a drawing by physicist and cosmologist Robert Fludd, reproduced in his book Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia in duo volumina secundum cosmi differentiam diuisa (1617-1621). Recognized as one of the earliest representations of the creation of the universe, the drawing shows an imperfect black square (a trapezoid) as the image of the pre-universe, of nothingness, of the black and formless void prior to the event of creation.