PEDRO CALAPEZ: o segredo da sombra – works on paper 2012-2016
Carmona e Costa Foundation,
Lisbon
May 21st // July 2nd 2016
Curator: João Miguel Fernandes Jorge
The shadow’s secret
(excerpts)
Everything begins in the face of another. Even in the painting and drawing of Pedro Calapez. Chiefly in that risk of indiscretion that is drawing. Not in the closeness of light it may bring and preserve, but in the verbal expression of its shadow; this one is much more than mimicry: it is a voice that commands the fragility of the line, that does not let it die alone, a prisoner of indifference, in a dissolution of presence.
The line that has captured the face of another, that has preserved the water of a river, the tree of a forest, the colour of a fire or was the purest expression of its own non-face has entered the shadow’s secret.
Through the indefinite, through the infinite, the drawing achieves its passage to something more than its opposite: to a transposition and a plurality, thus somehow evading its limiting margins. Behind and inside the drawing lies its simplicity, which takes the form of a constant idea of escape, that is to say, of departure
Onto the [broader] face of abstraction, which is a kind of imaginary entrance hall for these works on paper by Pedro Calapez, multiple rules of understanding and illusion converge, in which colour stands for pure use and a hidden form of reason, also pure and simple, beneath the drawing’s dimmest section.
The eye looks for a certain point of view, pursues it and explores that stance in accordance with a certain order of succession: from drawing to drawing. It passes from one series to the next; then it goes back, just to confirm its impressions. Finally, it selects this and that other drawing. More than simply projecting itself as gaze onto the writing, the blotch, the shadow and that same shadow’s secret, the eye is a solitary walker and the drawings are its chosen paths
