Rui CHAFES (1966)

The sculptural work of this artist is built according to a cohesive project, conceived of and developed since the first public presentations of his work. In the second half of the 1980s a series of three solo exhibits (Galeria Leo in 1986 and 1987 and Espaço Poligrupo Renascença in 1988) in Lisbon introduced his work, made of diverse materials (wood, cane, and plastic) and animated by light and colour. These pieces already suggested some of the structural postulates of his subsequent artistic production: the creation of delimited objects, the predomination of organic-like forms, the suggestion of lightness and dematerialisation enhanced by fragile materials. Furthermore, this work gave priority to the question of the relationship of the objects to space, in the sense that his pieces refuse the literal logic of the monument, and often have the effect of an installation.

None of these postulates were altered when, in 1989, the artist started to use painted iron. The unity of his project has been retained, therefore, independently of the formal diversity of the sculptures made in the last decade, and of his continued involvement with other means of artistic production. Principally, this takes the form of the publication of books where the register of sculptural work interacts with drawing, photography and texts, either signed by the sculptor or collected from other authors (Würzburg Bolton Landing, A&A, 1995, and Durante o Fim, A&A, 2000). Thus the unity of Rui Chafes’s project persists, anchored to a double platform where a kind of methodic doubt about the nature of artistic creation is combined with the possibility of a return to more disciplined sculpture.

It is on such an axis of contradiction, that the artist manages the paradoxes of his work – by demanding the tense cohabitation of apparently irreconcilable preconceptions: art/banality, territorial/nomadic, natural/artificial, beautiful/sublime, affection/aggression, order/ disquiet, object/dematerialisation, weight/lightness.

The pieces that Chafes builds combine formal accuracy with scars of technical execution; the completeness of the structure with the emptiness of volume; the verticality of medieval art with the post-minimal eradication of monumental logic; symmetrical, biomorphic order with the restlessness of violence. These characteristics are mimicked or evoked through their references to machines of war, torture objects, aggressive bodily involucres and other markers of violent death, and through the weight of the iron and its contradictory neutralisation by means of its colouring and suspension. This is precisely what Durante o Sono (During Sleep) shows us, with its enormous globe suspended by snaking wires.

Moreover, these sculptures involve their surroundings in spite of their nomadic autonomy. They question or even transform these places simply by their presence. We may note also that this occupying strategy, which is not synonymous with possession, has recently liberated itself from the gallery and the museum by breaking into the landscape: in the Palácio da Pena Gardens, Sintra, Durante o Fim (During the End, 2000); on a façade of a church in Spain; in the botanical gardens of Oporto, or on the cliffs and beaches of the Atlantic Coast in Sintra, Um Sopro (A Breath of Air, 2003).

We may also note that this artist’s work does not subscribe to the experimental logic of the artistic vanguard. On the contrary, Chafes attempts to rehabilitate the sense of discovery and revelation amply referenced in German Romanticism, and in particular in in the thinking of Novalis, whose work he translated in the book, Fragmentos de Novalis (Fragments of Novalis), A&A, 1992. The artist went to Germany after finishing a Sculpture degree at the ESBAL (Escola Superior de Belas-Artes Lisboa) in 1989. He resumed his studies there taking classes with Gerard Merz at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf until 1992. Chafe’s stay in Germany deepened his theoretical knowledge, which continues to sustain the questioning nature in his work. This theory, filled with Romantic ideals, allows each work to germinate as a fragment that can then be placed in a greater equation where, as Novalis retains, “All forces of Nature are one force only”. Rui Chafes’ sculpture, like all forms that are contradictory and in transformation in the visible world, shares in and reveals this force.

JOANA CUNHA LEAL