Inherent Distortion
17.02.2018
07.04.2018

This group show brings together the work of four contemporary artists: Marcelo Cidade, Nicolás Robbio, Pablo Accinelli and Rui Calçada Bastos.

Working in and with the cities that he has travelled to or lived in (Macau, Shanghai, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro), Rui Calçada Bastos focuses on urban landscapes, objects, shapes and situations that would perhaps be overlooked at first glance. Working with photography, video, sculpture and drawing, he explores his themes poetically, confronting the spectator with a self-referential view.

Over the last years, Pablo Accinelli’s work has been delving into the functional and poetic relationship that exists between an object and a tool. The themes that he approaches through his artistic practice encompass an allusion to our mundane surroundings that is both defined and subtle. The practical application of this perspective results in a reduction of elements and objects to their quantifiable existence, ultimately manipulating how we perceive them.

With work that is often informal and subversive, Marcelo Cidade puts the ideals and paradigms of modernist architecture into question. Appropriating urban spaces, the artist creates new languages and tampers with our pre-conceived notions of space. Exposing consolidated social relationships and values, his work produces a counter current, an “aesthetic of resistance” that examines multifaceted social conflicts, transporting symbols and situations from the street into spaces dedicated to the development of art.

Why lamps, sand, spheres, wires, apples and scales? Nicolás Robbio’s work often uses elements such as these, which the artist describes as objects of general knowledge. The things that appear throughout his work are precisely no more and no less than generally recognizable things. Just as the meaning contained within this cipher, ‘thing’, may be overlooked by habit in language, the specific resonance of the everyday thing itself is often hidden from view, disguised by its application as a practical, usable object.

The combination of the pieces presented in this exhibition creates a narrative that underlines their disruptive nature. Each represents, in one way or another, a subversion of what we are accustomed to seeing, and further still, a distortion of how we perceive it. This power of transposition is what gives this exhibition its name, and what ultimately creates a space that challenges us to question the everyday objects that surround us.