Pedro GOMES (1972)

Pedro Gomes was born in Mozambique in 1972. He completed the Curso Avançado de Artes Plásticas (Advanced Fine Arts Course) at the Ar.Co and an MA Sculpture at the Chelsea College of Art, in London. He lives and works in Lisbon.

From 1994 onwards he participated in the Biennales and in 1996 was integrated into the 7 Artistas ao 10.º Mês (7 Artists at the 10th Month) exhibition at the Modern Art Centre. The works Sem Título (Untitled) – Habitat series – which were executed in ballpoint pen on paper, consisted in images of urban landscapes taken from blown-up photographs. Juxtaposing and making progressively denser two or three colour surfaces, edges and forms were defined as a negative on the white of the sheet and as a positive on the more or less dark coiling blotches consist.

This series, a paradigm component of his work, wherein the issues of human presence and absence, identity and anonymity, heteronomy and differentiation are equated through architectural scale, can be associated with three other series where these issues are re-elaborated in distinct ways: a 1997 piece made in London, consists of a series of nine heads in melted aluminium. The heads, which were taken from newspaper images, become confused in a blur of contours that neutralises their representation, and results in the loss of their central theme. In 1998, sets of black chairs drawn in rubber on paper formed the imposition of a silence on the structure of place. In 1999, with drawings made with fire – a process that was to be taken up once again in 2000 with Linha de Fogo (Line of fire) – the artist, created a blotched area over the stylised poses of people photographing or filming. This blotched area (created where the paper was burnt by a blowtorch) had the potential to spread out. This made the expectation of the figure’s effacement particularly meaningful, beginning with the occultation of its gaze and face and later extending to the camera, to the capturing of images and to the body.

There is in his work a more sculptural side where landscape can also be present, as in the installations of plaster buildings on wine trays (Exangues, [Bloodless], 1998 at the Abel Pereira da Fonseca warehouses), but where the use of chains, tapes or cables defines a global metaphor for the dependent or serial condition of the city dwelling human (the 1996 suitcases, for example, linked by plastic cables). An able manipulator who is in the process of losing presence and identity (The 2001 Jogos de Guerra – War Games – consisted of two computer shaped objects enveloped in camouflage fabric and linked by a chain); affectionate, yet as a prison and a closed circuit (in Estarei Sempre Contigo – [I’ll Always Be With You], 1995, the artist accumulates several different types of circular tubing, held together by metal brackets); he is aware of the body but only as a function of cruel and corsetting idealisations (in Light Diet, 2000, two enormous parallelepipeds are covered in coloured plastic tapes and the narrow lateral walls are respectively covered by a mirror and by household scales); an able inventor of devices whose movement is betrayed by the internal boycott of its own forms and functions (Stop, 1999, is made from electronic counter that has had its numeration stopped and a cylinder with coiled wires that have similarly had their circulation stopped).

Despite studying sculpture, Pedro Gomes has a characteristic taste for drawing, and in both instances, for non conventional materials that are recognizable because of their proximity to people’s daily lives. Materials that are capable of erasing reference and expression in favour of a plastic re-creation and critique of ideas appropriated from the supposedly civilised world. Such is the case in the series Paraíso (Paradise) presented in Funchal in 2000. At the exhibition that was presented there, several stages in his oeuvre were seen for a second time, now in the favourable light of their evolutionary passage.

The drawings directly on the walls of an empty apartment on the Calçada da Ajuda (2003), entitled Masturbações (Masturbations), corresponded to using space as a medium in a manner previously unexplored in his work. The series, Piscinas and Montanhas (Pools and Mountains) from 2002, also introduced a new technical procedure in his work. The idea of the photographic negative was once again referenced, in terms of the alternative geography that the white luminosity of the paint introduced on the rusted iron backgrounds.

LEONOR NAZARÉ