The demand of a deeper world fraction, of a sensitive, rich and prodigious reality, that makes us shudder before a work, marks this individual exhibition of Henrique Vieira Ribeiro.
Tremor treats the extreme experience of simultaneous restlessness and pleasure that art empowers: the condition of visibility, amenable to the induction of a state of soul, in which all movements are suspended, in which the mind is so completely filled with its object who can not articulate his astounding strangeness. The set of works presented thus appears, although in a very different way, in the domain of the tradition of tragic representations, whose marked reverberation on the spectator Edmund Burke has designated as sublime [1].
The scenario of catastrophe that is announced in Revelation radiates the same reverberation: through these abstractions generated without reference but recognizable to our eyes as landscapes of great aesthetic wealth, a dizzying feeling, a watched terror that fascinates, a salutary fear that relates to the self-preservation, with our conscious fragility and mortal condition, which is affirmed as a negative elevation.
With Revelation a kind of slit opens on the flat surface of the landscape and with it a vastness of possibilities which, if on the one hand, go through the natural arrangement of attention to detail, to fragment, to a shatter of memory, on the other, they trace the reverse path of the end of time [2] to the beginning [3] by culminating in the frames of Genesis II. These spectral and enigmatic images operate in their unexpected forms, forces and rhythms, the fixation of memories of light – matter loses density and everything is seen, between the same deep grays, by its glow, by its obscured luminous nature, timeless and infinite.
Genesis I enceta the game of duality between the positive-negative, now delineating a path from the image to the matrix. More than the derivation of the same theme, Genesis II signed the materialized recovery of light, from the sober and rhythmic alignment of rectangular columns-like true scintillating supports-the light passes through the subtleties of the matrices, to cease its function as a medium of all visibility and to reveal itself to itself, as dazzling as if to hatch, as if to try to determine at all its symbolic reference, that of the divine excrescence, as a life that does not cease to be done, to be excerpted [4].
It is also the light that founds the ultimate encounter with the triad Propagation # 1, Metamorphosis & Rumor. Three videos establish a vertical dialogue marked by the simultaneous movement of concealment and revelation of excerpts that point to the becoming of Heraclitus, to a cyclical and tense alternation between opposing states, between the two great pillars of human interdicts [5] – death and birth – and still, by the continuous witness of the hypnotizing sequence, for their transgression. As if, suddenly, through the work (s) and absent from our flesh, we are endowed with the infinite capacity to undergo a similar experience of death and rebirth, and thus connect with the unlimited dimension of the sacred.
In Tremor we are offered a itinerancy guided by balanced tensions and complementary antagonisms, manifested in the astonishing series that Henrique Vieira Ribeiro presents to us, as well as in the relations established in the uninhabitable clear and dark chambers that are destined to them, where again, in the distant of us and of our temporality, we have only to yield to the precipice.
[1] BURKE, Edmund, Uma Investigação Filosófica Acerca da Origem das Nossas Ideias do Sublime e do Belo, Lisboa: Edições 70, 2013.
[2] Os Falsos Doutores in Bíblia Sagrada, ed. 18, Lisboa, Difusora Bíblica, 1995, p. 1608.
[3] Génesis in Bíblia Sagrada, ed. 18, Lisboa, Difusora Bíblica, 1995, p. 17.
[4] MAIA, Tomás, Incandescência Cézanne e a Pintura, apresentação de Sara Antónia Matos, 1ª ed., Lisboa, Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar/Sistema Solar, 2015.
[5] BATAILLE, Georges, O Nascimento da Arte, 1ª ed., Lisboa, Sistema Solar, 2015, p. 46.
