Reflections, Enclaves, Deviations

José Pedro Croft (Porto, 1957) returns to the CCB with a major exhibition after almost 25 years. The focus of this exhibition is a selection of the works he produced during this century. Croft is one of the leading Portuguese artists of the generation that emerged shortly after the Carnation Revolution of 1974. Linked to the ideals of freedom, cosmopolitanism, and experimentation, his visual poetics are affirmed through confrontation with the very materiality of the forms of visual expression – the line, the plane, colour, space – without neglecting their expansion into architecture and the body (inherent in the artist’s gestures and the viewer’s perception).

It is worth highlighting both the austerity and restraint of meticulous, daily work in the studio, and the call for the viewer to work imaginatively with visual signs. Seeing is not recognising. The many variations in the graphic series draw the eye into a process in which repetition and difference are heightened. Attention to detail has political connotation in an era of self-serving dispersion.

A monographic exhibition should seek a curatorial path that highlights aspects of the artist’s poetics that help us understand his contemporaneity, his links and frictions with art history, and his ability to face the challenges of today’s world. Our everyday perception, based on fragmentation and excess, is called upon to deconstruct shared aesthetic hegemonies, our perceptual habits. In this regard, I would highlight two important elements that permeate Croft’s work: the original articulation between graphic practice, constructive tradition, architectural elements and the scale of the body; and the plastic rigour that requires the viewer to take time to experience the work, resisting the acceleration of our attentional regime.

In the dialectic between repetition and difference that marks his poetics, it is worth highlighting how the artist works – and reworks – the copper plates and constantly interferes with the prints. The serial game produces micro-differences that force the viewer to stop and notice how such shifts produce intense spatial energies. Chromatic changes and the play of light and shadow are also elements the artist uses from his interventions in the matrices of the engravings, scraping, cleaning, marking, superimposing colours – in short, transforming this arduous clash with the materials into a thought inherent to the engraver’s work.

A curatorial decision was made to focus on drawings and graphic production, updating the age-old dictates of engraving studios, with their technicians and prescriptive rules. This aspect forces us to shift the temporality of our perceptual behaviour. The effort inherent in making the prints imposes a slower pace on their reception, since the overlapping layers that are evident in the print runs do not readily reveal themselves to the eye. At certain moments, recurring in the works exhibited at the MAC/CCB, the chromatic density and combination of colours produce a depth of field that is anything but trivial with regard to printmaking.

The mirror-like reflexivity that disorients our spatial perception reverberates in the making, unmaking, and remaking of the metal plates, with their multiplications of spatial volumes. There is a continuous exchange between the work of the hand and that of the eye; an internal articulation in the exhaustive confrontation of the metal plate of the engravings with the optical displacements and insinuating deviations of his sculptures. Metal, glass, mirror, lines, colour, graphic memory, overlaps, instability: all of it reverberates between prints, drawings and sculptures.

José Pedro Croft’s production over recent decades features a constant appropriation of gestures and plastic elements repositioned by a rapidly changing world which he maintains a relationship of tension and conflict. It is within the conflicts with the present that art enhances its commitment to freedom and to the experimental exercise of seeing that which we are unable to recognise.

Opening Wednesday 29.04, 7pm
Tuesdays to Sundays, 10am > 6.30pm
closed on Mondays
until Sunday 13.09.26

Location
Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre
Centro Cultural de Belém
Lisbon (PT)

Read more about José Pedro Croft.