Fidalga Project

A Ponta do Lápis e o Vespeiro | Reginaldo Pereira | from December 2nd to January 17th, 2014

2 + 2 = 5.7

A can exists in order to contain something / But when the poet says: “Can” / He might be trying to say the unstoppable

Gilberto Gil

Anytime there´s the intention to define Art, one runs the risk of reduction. That´s why some believe that the impossibility of a respective axiomatic definition is one of Art´s essences: if we encapsulate it, it won´t be about Art anymore. But in a general sense, in the experts’ circles, from the pub to the academy, there´s the consensus about its multiplicity, its multitude of duties that flee according to the perspective from where it tunes it. Very well, in this cloud with a variable volume and state which gravitational center modifies itself according to historical times, to one component that persists to instigate us, and that makes itself relevant specifically when it attempts to enter the territory where Reginaldo Pereira´s work expands itself: logic. Here, I refer to logic understood in its simplest expression, the articulation and combination of successive cells, be them thoughts, actions, instructions, etc.

In his path, Reginaldo Pereira has been developing a logical construction as way of a personal brand, namely, a way to proceed, that sets a dialogue between two attributes that the common sense sees as opposites: the rational and the sensory.

In a first approach to his work it his affinity with conceptual art is made clear, where, let´s agree, the rational component is made present in a sharper way. This idea surfaces quickly because in his work things are not what they are (this will become clearer further down the text).

At the same time that we distrust the existence of hidden layers in the dialogue with his work, we also notice the powerful and restrained formal rigour and the sophisticated finishing that we, who follow his path, know that are of his personal account. Pereira was formally trained as an architect, and it was certainly as a student that he grew this particular skill in producing his works of art fusing discourse and form with precision, a typical set in motion of architects who graduated in schools heirs to the Bauhaus mentality and its transdisciplinary school curriculum where the hands on job is as important as the empirical and theoretical reflection.

This logical procedure includes the ability to intervene on ordinary objects from an inside out logic. I explain myself: Pereira has the habit of collecting objects from all sorts of sources, from the street to friends´ houses, or sometimes he buys them from cheap shops or stationary stores. Sometimes getting inspiration from the moment when he first gets in touch with the object or after living with it for a while, but always in a cathartic process, he discovers, invents, combines, manipulates and recreates the shape and the structure of it, not in the sense of shape for the sake of it, or in an attempt to recover memories. His interventions result in artefacts that seem to us familiar or to some extent possible, where the original object incorporates many and bizarre capabilities and functions. The strange combinations and utilities that he imposes to this daily objects eventually invoke atmospheres and/or narratives, dense or trifty, but always direct and without rhetoric or excesses.

Precisely in the promotion of this metamorphosis, in this gap between what is and what can be, that Pereira´s work touch the political. In turning daily objects inside out, the artist makes comments on the social space of the city, defending the idea that, behind everything that is, there is the power of the new, of the unknown, of the useful and the useless, of the comical and the tragic, of the indispensable and the essential.

Fernando Velázquez, November 2013

A ponta do lápis e o vespeiro | Reginaldo Pereira | de 02 de dezembro a 17 de janeiro de 2014

Overview of the exhibition A ponta do lápis e o vespeiro / first room

Detail of the exhibition A ponta do lápis e o vespeiro / first room

Detail of the exhibition A ponta do lápis e o vespeiro / first room

Overview of the exhibition A ponta do lápis e o vespeiro / first room

Detail of the exhibition A ponta do lápis e o vespeiro / first room

Overview of the exhibition A ponta do lápis e o vespeiro / second room