Shifting and Displaced

Art, at its most powerful, challenges our ways of seeing. In Shifting and Displaced, José Pedro Croft invites us to question our habitual perceptions. His works encourage a humbler mode of attention – opening our senses and intellect to new ways of seeing and feeling the world. Croft’s elegant artworks gently slow us down and yet keep us in motion, involving us fully in their subtle transformations.

José Pedro Croft (b. 1957, Porto) trained as a painter at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, but his practice also incorporates sculpture, drawing and etching, each medium informing the others. His steps are only temporary resting points in an ongoing process of revisiting and recreating – a never-ending search for what feels, even if only momentarily, like the right distance from where to move forward. His work mainly explores the instability of form and questions the apparent self-evidence of geometrical shapes. In open series of permutations and fragmentations – where construction and deconstruction meet – Croft goes beyond static minimalism by embracing movement, paradox, and intuition.

This exhibition focusses on a seemingly new element in Croft’s work: the circle. While he has primarily explored the possibilities of lines and rectangles, circles have often remained peripheral – though never entirely absent. Croft’s recent engagement with circles bears the imprint of earlier sculptures. As always in his practice, these works carry the memory of previous pieces and are inhabited by the ghosts of their earlier iterations. Each new version is part of a longer process that can span many years. “I am putting memory on a plate,” Croft says. Yet his reworking of the past is never nostalgic. For Croft, transformation begins with an act of physical destruction, allowing material traces to shape what comes next. His practice, therefore, requires a courage to erase – while recognizing its ultimate impossibility.

By explicitly focusing on the circle, this exhibition invites us to reconsider one of our most idealized archetypical forms. The nine works on paper – combining etching with gouache, varnish, and Indian ink – and the two iron sculptures present circles that have been fragmented, split, cut, subtracted, and reassembled. As we piece together what has fallen apart or break down what has been united, we come to question our longing for wholeness as well as our desire for separation.

While clearly geometric, these works are not abstract. Croft’s geometry doesn’t aim to represent a mathematical idea – like a circle or a line – that would reduce the viewer to a merely passive admirer of sublime perfection. Instead, his geometry is deeply material and embodied, transgressing objectivity and stability. He calls it a “pedestrian” geometry of paths and tracks, shaped by both his own and the viewers bodies. One could also call it a “minor” geometry that modulates our major keys of perception, unsettling and rehumanizing the abstract Platonic idea(l)s we so often desire.

To democratize geometry, Croft’s practice avoids sophisticated technologies and embraces the imperfections and natural accidents of handmade work. When creating his etchings, he works directly on the copper plate, never fully knowing what will appear after stamping. He then reworks and layers them with gouache or Indian ink, building a protective “skin” that still reveals his brushstrokes. As a result, these works are not perfect copies but unique, textured shapes that reflect the unpredictability of their creation. Stains, tears, and marks become part of the story, materializing memories of an always embodied, unforeseeable process.

A closer look at the diptych that opens this exhibition – featuring the only two complete circles on display – reveals that even these “whole” circles (one red, the other black) began as broken, curved lines reclaimed from earlier works. This movement is particularly visible in the more transparent red circle, but also in the black one, where subtle modulations in tone disrupt any sense of homogeneity. In this way, Croft echoes René Magritte’s observation that “everything we see hides another thing [and] we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”

“I work energies, not forms,” Croft says. Unlike forms, energies are not abstract. Still, circles present a particular challenge for Croft, whose practice has always aimed to extend a work’s energy beyond its physical boundaries, inviting viewers to complete it in their minds. While lines easily continue as pathways of energy, circles can initially appear more self-contained. In most of the works on display, Croft addresses this by breaking circles into fragments and sections. In the diptych, however, Croft also takes a different approach, using black and red as opposing forces – black as an imploding energy pulling inward, and red as an exploding energy pushing outward – to deliberately destabilize the apparent stability of the circle-as-form, which only seems to hold together for a precarious moment in time.

In this way, José Pedro Croft’s non-abstract geometry unfolds as a slow dance with energy and alteration, foregrounding tension, imbalance, and fragility. His work offers a seemingly quiet yet radical meditation on impermanence – urgently relevant in today’s political climate. His sober aesthetic acknowledges our need for rest and belonging. Yet, through its continual displacements, it resists any sense of final arrival, calmly opening multiple pathways that unsettle our desire for contemplative stillness. As such, Croft’s art keeps us in motion, gently reminding us not to linger too long but to keep reworking the endless paradox in which things both come together and fall apart.

– Pieter Boons
(curator at the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp)
Based on an interview with the artist on February 27, 2025

Communiqué de presse
Press release

Opening Thursday 13.03, 5pm > 9pm
Exhibition until Saturday 10.05

Location
Irène Laub gallery
29 rue Van Eyck
1050 Brussels (BE)

Read more about José Pedro Croft