Pedro CABRITA REIS (1956)

Born in Lisbon, 1956, Pedro Cabrita Reis studied Painting at the Escola Nacional de Belas-Artes de Lisboa (National School of Fine Arts of Lisbon) and has been exhibiting his work since the beginning of the 1980s. The privileged exercise of painting and drawing was evident in his first shows.

However this gave way to multiple techniques and materials gathered to create objects/constructions/installations, and by the end of the decade these were already the most well known part of his work. This shift did not mean that he abandoned his previous means of production. The systematic practice of drawing remained untouched – see the series of self-portraits in O Rosto da Máscara, 1994, CCB (Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisboa, Portugal), (The Face of the Mask, 1994) – just as a significant part of the pieces gathered in his last national exhibition (Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal, 1999) returned pictorial values to his work. Either way, his oeuvre intentionally escapes any sort of disciplinary categorization, enabling an inexhaustible variety of combinations during the production of his work. In many cases his pieces maintain beyond this a vital relationship with the space where they are installed.

We should therefore start by pointing out that the series of objects /constructions /installations are usually made with common materials from the world we live in. Although plexiglas, aluminium and enamel or acrylic paint frequently occur in his most recent work, the majority of his pieces are made from an enormous variety of materials used in the construction of buildings, to which we can add cards, cloths, felt, tape, etc, and a group of objects for everyday use (chairs, pots, baskets, lamps, doors, amongst other things).

Familiar forms and situations result from these raw materials when viewed for the first time. However, we soon take note of their strangeness, their provocative nature, because although they retain the memory of their material execution, what was ordinary and habitual in them has been radically seized. In other words, his works belong to a territory free of the false clarity of explanatory, descriptive, or illustrative formulas and, because of this, they expand the possibilities for constructing the world. That is what the first major reckoning of his work shows us, which took place in 1994 at the CAMJAP, and that already includes Meus pais deram-me aquilo que podiam, alma da sua diversa (My parents gave me what they could, a soul dissimilar from their own) of 1993. It is also what his two most recent installations, conceived for the 50th Biennale of Venice in 2003, continue to demonstrate.

In any case we are confronted with a visual language where the forged naturalization of the meanings reacquires its arbitrary condition. This gives us back, in his own words, the “genial and the absolute initial chaos” (Pedro Cabrita Reis, 1992: 148). As the artist states, art’s intelligence must act on this chaos: “in the ‘hands’ of the artist [this chaos will be] the material for the permanent construction of mystery, since the more perfect art is, contrary to other forms of knowledge, the greater its level of obscurity will be.” (idem).

In short, we are confronted with a universe where, regardless of its level of simplicity or complexity, the structures – that can evoke cities, houses, windows, doors, ladders, tables, waters streams, fountains, dams, etc, or remain abstract – try to establish “the metaphor’s absolute desire” (idem), obscuring the given to finally open it in an indeterminate sense, which is more productive and true because it is more poetic.

Installing a world, Cabrita Reis’ works illuminates the hidden essence of the earth that gives us protection, making us inhabit it poetically. As he states in an interview with Arte Ibérica magazine (n.º 32, Feb. 2000): “one of my deepest desires is that after seeing something of mine, people will identify reality through my work. That is, they see the ladder, Posto de Observação (Point of Observation), then they see Catedral, then, as they pass by a building under construction on a hill, they will never again be able to disconnect from what they have seen. Art, if it claims to be an instrument to expand intelligence or the perception of the world, has a unifying function here.”

JOANA CUNHA LEAL