“Ater,” matte black in Latin, thus begins from a premise of rebellion — a declaration of intent, a reclaiming to oneself — and, consequently, the sharp and peremptory assumption of the artist as ethnographer: avant-garde in thought, contemporary in form and content, a “return of the real” as articulated by Hal Foster.
Walking on a floor covered with shredded tire rubber, we also encounter the underlying wound in the work of Augusto Brázio; we find time branded by fire in Rui Soares Costa, on that tenuous boundary between the destruction of a material and the creation of an aesthetic object. We encounter the “penumbra struck by light” of Rui Horta Pereira, in a register that is at once graphic and poetic — an epitaph, perhaps. And because, as Fernando Pessoa once said, “I do not wish to go where there is no light,” we find the series “Antecâmara” by Inês d’Orey, which returns us to that place of intimacy, of seclusion. And of light.
