The other side  

Individual exhibition  

Daisy Prieto

Carla Rebelo's exhibition for the Doispaços gallery was born out of her interest in the morphology of this place. The pieces, with a sculptural and/or installation character, are all new and designed to establish a dialogical relationship with the architectural specificity of the rooms.

The exhibition «the other side» is established within a body of work that is based on the artist's hyper-subjectivity, on her perception of the world, always conditioned by memory, imagination, personal experiences and individual way of feeling. If the construction of reality depends on individual perceptual sensitivity – which is a distinctive mark – it is then from this perceptual awareness, and having metaphor as a creative device, that Carla Rebelo exposes herself with a work that emphasizes the shadow in a mise-en- scène and the mirror in a mise-en-abîme with unusual contours. Invisible stories, secret or to be told, are at the genesis of this set of works where the "I" is latent and the "you" is invited to witness an event of profound intimacy, which is offered to it, or rather, which slowly reveals itself to it. .

To expose is to homogenize, it is to erase the hesitation that precedes any authorial choice to, thus, fix and impose meanings. The titles of the pieces in this exhibition, as well as the title that groups them together, function as a «poetic laboratory» that delimits, by suggestion of a certain field of imagery, the horizon of expectation of the aesthetic experience. The title names, indicates or shows, designates a content and is displayed within a set of pieces by the same author, it is an index, summary and formula within a network that lists the works. The adequacy of the title in the pieces by Carla Rebelo (which here quote Fernando Pessoa), give them a performative character in that it not only individuates them but also participates in their own plastic dimension.

the other that was me

“We never love anyone. We love, just the idea we have of someone. It is our concept – in short, it is ourselves – that we love»1

Two seats located at the same height are joined by a structure that, by imitating, by repetition, the stability structure of the legs of conventional chairs, also suggests a ladder. The piece develops in a half-moon, in a semi-circumference whose point of balance is, strictly speaking, what keeps each of the seats, located at both ends, level. It is a double chair, the artist's metaphor for the "perfect relationship", as these seats face each other, evoke a dialogic and frontal pair and, at the slightest touch, the entire structure oscillates with a sway that makes them go up and down in turn, always equidistant, always facing each other. This sculpture inevitably refers to the playful object of childhood: the swing for two people, which oscillates with the weight, will always be a pedagogical device and a source of pleasure. It provides an experience on the order of physics where weight, volume, balance and quantity interact in play.

If the ladder is access, here is the access to the other. The sculpture is that of the absent figure(s). Installed with a great scenic sense, the piece projects a shadow, a flat duplication of the object. The "plus one" of an apparent repetition in shadow is, here, confirmation of a new entity with its own characteristics: a haunted or specular "other" that always accompanies the sculptural piece, to complete, unify and/or transfigure it. The title also adds a dimension, producing a “psychological” shadow over the “other”. It is the shadow of the “I”, of an “I” that is also a specular projection. In this way, the artist formulates a game of abysses from the shadow, duplicating it real and virtually, making it a metaphor for specular projection, (re)dimensioning its contours in an oscillation that goes from the self to the «other». The game of shadows, summoned by the artist, fluctuates between identity and otherness and this is the movement that gives it a whole meaning.

«I am the size of what I see and not the size of my height»  

In Carla Rebelo's metaphorical plan, the chair replaces the presence/absence of someone (of an “other”) and also of the “same”, as the sculptor always takes her biography as the primary reference for the conception of her pieces.

A chair for very tall people, made of wood, depends on a mirror and a wall, where it is backed-in to complete the reflection. This illusory completeness takes place in the alteration of the apparent morphology of the chair, which partially affects this object from the seat to the back: the chair seems to extend through the mirror to receive “more” someone and, in this movement, it becomes whole. The mirror is part of a set of stuccoes-in-frame, crucial in the characterization of this room, a heritage from other times. On the wall, two frames, one with a mirror and one without, suggest a diptych. If the one in the mirror completes the artist's piece, the other remains blind. All this mise-en-scéne calls into question what is or is not whole. The incompleteness of the wooden chair and the blind frame, which lacks a mirror, appear as traces of a supposed symmetry, pointing to the lack of duplication. This lack metaphorizes the failure: the effective failure of discourse in dialogue, which inevitably leads to soliloquy.

The title refers to logics other than those of the law of physics, as the size of the container does not coincide with the containment capacity. The expectation is an expansion or reduction of the field of perception vis-à-vis the perceptive body.

restlessness

A construction summons a weaving mechanism. The engraving on which Carla Rebelo is based is a 19th-century illustration of the volume “The art of silk” from Diderot's visual encyclopedia of knowledge, used to twist the threads and thicken them in order to make them more and more resistant. From the 24 coils of this summoning mechanism, there are silk threads dyed with quinacridone pigment, which cross the room to join in a single thread that covers a left hand. This sedated hand, because immobile and imprisoned by the silk threads, rests on a small table that resembles a dressing table. It has its pair in a specular reflection whose framing makes the reflection of the web of fibers (real and in shadow) impossible to highlight only the silk hand, suggesting it in freedom. There is then a left hand imprisoned in the filaments that condition its movement, and a free right hand, which results from a specular illusion. In this skillful mise-en-scene, the mirror only duplicates the hand, letting the lines that bind it escape to the reflection. On the wall, this entire linear design is projected in shadow.

Reality seems to (re)invent itself in specular similarity and in shadow, in an unexpected staging of projections where metaphor is the resource that gives visibility to various dichotomies, the most significant being that suggested by the title, which immediately leads us to the homonymous book . In her essay dedicated to Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, Maria Augusta Babo dismantles the word: «Desassocego can thus be divided into dis-a-so-cego. Removing the negation from it, we obtain the signifier socego which, split, forms two others: alone and blind.» The author's conclusions regarding the title of this book are profound. In the case of Carla Rebelo's play, restlessness confirms an estrangement, a latent and restless anguish, an immobility that wants to move. It is also a warning murmur that leads to suspicion of its sense of visible thing (appearance) insofar as there is a visual deception, a specular illusion, a trick that summons us to «the other side of the mirror».

growth maps

Five maps embroidered on a single piece of linen each formulate the design of an autobiographical topology (up to age 20) that follows the fictional regime. The title is descriptive: Carla Rebelo evokes her childhood home in Lisbon to reflect and remember different times in her life. The criteria are determined by the schools she has attended until today, as a student, and which defined not only her paths but also her knowledge of the city of Lisbon.

The chosen representation process is slow: a manual embroidery. Each point is like a step that, in one movement, transposes the habit of walking, where exercises of thinking and remembering are provided. On this translucent linen fabric, the colors chosen for embroidery also have different functions: black indicates the specifics of a legend that names and identifies; ocher defines buildings of reference to the route, namely the house, the school, the library, the costume museum; Crimson draws the very scheme of the city: the mapping translated into a drawing is the transposition of mental walks continuously activated by a memory that transforms and adapts within a schizophrenic creation process. "Maps of growth" juxtaposes, on the same woven surface, five stages of life, five consecutive times. At each moment, the artist exercises (de)multiplications of herself, at this or that age, in order, between memories and inventions, to (re)build topological self-narratives.

«Growth maps» is a piece where the right and the wrong are in equal prominence (unlike conventional embroidery). The right side is that of control, order, regularity of the point; on the wrong side there is an inversion of the drawing, an irregularity of the point that causes a disturbance in the reading. The reverse is the reverse. The unconscious of the conscious.

Installed in the gallery's window, it seeks a relationship with the public space. If the monument celebrates a past event that became a commemorative landmark, then the memorial intends to keep present the memory of an event that should never be repeated, that is, it is remembrance. In this piece by Carla Rebelo right and wrong, proper and universal, private space and public space, work as acts of detachment and evocation that reconfigure themselves as a memorial.

Building a new territory for me from an already known one

Carla Rebelo's plays are generated from stories based on her autobiography. By norm or method, it is on them that he relies to give meaning to his creation. However, and because all artistic work is born out of a compulsion, an uncontrollable impulse, there are formalizations that anticipate conscious stories. They are pieces that impose themselves due to the need for materialization and whose stories are still in the plan of the future, hidden in the silence of memory, without verbalization or any other manifestation that is not their plastic concreteness.

This is the case of «Building me a new territory from an already known one». The paths traced with the crimson line simulate imaginary routes linking fragments of ancient maps, outside of a current time/space, from which the most identifying indications were cut (such as, for example, the names of rivers or important cities). These fragments are reassembled, by the artist, within an ocean of felt that escapes the cartography of this or that place to become a metaphor for an imagined peninsula. Here, the islands seem to extend from drawing to drawing, each one autonomously, and all together they propose an organization that is, in itself, a new drawing. It is in the assembly that this unitary set is born. Therefore, each time it is exhibited, the piece can present a different combination, as Carla Rebelo appropriates (only) the imagery of the map. That is, its visual sense is dissociated from the on-site verification. However, even if deprived of its function, the perceptible resonances are more than enough for us to think about mapping, to try to exercise, on these drawings, the exercise of recognition.

Aware of the impossibility of a measurement (of confirming a place and/or a location against the place), there is the surprise of a cartography of the illusory, precisely because the conditions that pre-figure perception itself remain. The memory of these mapping processes, of their schematic aspects that give us conditions for building the image, permeates each drawing. And because the processes of similarity in metaphor are governed by an adequate dissimilarity towards the visible, each map opens up as a field for imagination.

illusion game

A wooden half-table, a half-book with a crimson hard cover (whose pages were glued together, preventing browsing) and a mirror (where the artist intervenes directly with a drawing) are the essential devices that are articulated in the staging of «Jogo of illusions'. The duplication of the half-book by the mirror makes it deceptively complete and open, that is, the book is seen as a whole but is constituted by two distinct halves: one objectual and the other specular.

In this apparently entire book, the artist creates an illusion using a strategically directed light: it is an «elastic» drawing that moves with the displacement of the viewer. What, in fact, exists is a graphic intervention on the mirrored surface, a shadow of that register and its projection. The graphic mark simulates a vertical plane, suggests a perpendicular page (coincident with the specular surface). The mirror participates in this completeness because it seems to disappear as a mirror to camouflage itself in a transparent page, suspended in a movement of the leafing. The plastic support, thus made imperceptible, interferes with perception because, within another logic, it disturbs the specular reflection/duplication so that it can act as a signal. Repeating itself in three intensities: strong in the mirror, medium in the shadow, faint in the reflection of that shadow, the brand thus creates a design evocative of a landscape register. Illusion that escapes the logic of the apparent completeness of the book, at the limit of a staging in an abyss that informs itself in the visual misunderstanding produced by the drawing intervened directly on the mirror.

Carla Rebelo defines the location of her pieces in order to delimit the observer's paths. It anticipates its movements and, consequently, the visibility of the frames. The ideal place for the enjoyment of each piece is foreseen, as well as the approximation plans, as if, ideally, the observer fulfilled a choreography conceived by the artist. It is in this expectation of movement that his pieces are installed and, only when this plane of fruition is diligently obeyed, do they seem to show themselves.

«Game of illusions» is a generic title that whispers to us a suspicion regarding the visible and calls for the dismantling of the illusionist mechanisms in question: a page that is not a page is perceived, and a drawing that is completed in the revelation of a double repetition : the even, specular page and the odd, real page – which is nothing more than the top of a set of several unfinished pages because glued together, thus constituting a solid volume, an illegible tome, erased in an accumulation that hides their eventual stories.

The half-book is objectual, a fragmented body, dismembered by an action whose horizon is not a reader but an observer. It's for seeing and not for reading. The play is established from a half-book that is not even half-book: perhaps it is a non-book, insofar as its function has been removed. It is anonymous, erased from any pre-text itself. In fact, if it has a title, author and editor, it is because it borrows them from the exhibition. This object exists as something else, exactly as an evocation of the idea of a book, of that entire book that is the sum of authorial intentions, of readings and interpretations as varied as those who enjoy it. Its only visible mark is found within the evocative register, which determines its aged paper pages as the place where shadow becomes a figural dimension, simultaneously protagonist and author of landscapes. The shadow is a manifestation of a line that marked the mirror, turning it into a plastic space. It is the presentification of an absence that was present in the actual act of production.

Daisy Prieto

Santa Cruz, June 27, 2010

1 PESSOA, Fernando, Livro do desassossego, Lisbon, ed.Richard Zenith/Assirio &Alvim, p.137

2 PESSOA, Fernando, Livro do desassossego, Lisbon, ed.Richard Zenith/Assirio &Alvim, p.80