Seam
23.03.2019
04.05.2019

Filão (Seam) is a non-permanent expression of an interpellated architecture, conceived under the idea of the experience of an interior space and built upon the relationship between the main dimensions of Ricardo Jacinto’s work (Lisbon, 1975): the fragmentation of the experience in the space and the archeology of his plastic grammar. The exhibition is composed by fragments from his work presented here in new shapes, expressions, senses and meanings. They are part of a plastic and sound vocabulary, of a changeable grammar that has been developed since the beginning of Jacinto’s work. So, each one of them is an expression of a potencially infinite movement and also an elementar logical layer in the construction of the narrative and the space.

The centerpiece of the exhibition – Filão – takes us back to 2007. Its original form was made as a result of the artist’s experience at Minas da Panasqueira (Mines of Panasqueira), Fundão, Portugal. Now, at the gallery, the three volumes look like a future construction, like a proto architecture. They give some specificities to the interior space and characterize it in a singular way. The mineral seam is replaced by a slit which was, in turn, designed in reference to the melodic contour of the second movement (Allemande) of the Bach’s Cello Suite No.1 in G major (1717-1723). This melody was used by Jacinto in very different dimensions by the time of the 2011 exhibition in Fundão. Simultaneously, there are small columns coupled with the polystyrene blocks making them supports for the sound driving and amplification. This way, and because of the blocks’ vibration and ressonance, the three seams become active participants in the sound piece. Medusa (2014-2018) is a multichannel electroacoustic system for sound pickup and diffusion developed by Jacinto for its cello, in order to investigate the sensory and plastic experience of the fragmentation and sonic dispersion in the space. It functions as if an explosion could concentrically separate a melody in parts and puts us inside the composition. However, here in the exhibition, the Medusa composition comes from a feedback system caused by those columns on the seams and controlled by a computer which, in one hand, manages the intensity of the feedbacks, avoiding the collapse and the efective explosion of the system and its sources, and in the other hand, guides the construction of the sound line through a random organization of recorded fragments from those sounds generated by the blocks’ ressonance and vibration and by the feedbacks, at the same time.

This way, the artist creates the basis for this absolutely interior and transitory space in which the visitor is invited to enter and to recognize the present time of the installation in its continuous reconfiguration. However, there is another fundamental contribution for the transformation of the space atmosphere which contaminates the viewer with the sensation of being at an interior space. It is the Splinter (2015) light and it works as another logical layer in the reading and narrative of the space. In terms of precedence, the projected drawing derives from the “Left Hand” fiction that Hugo Brito wrote about Cones (2008) by Ricardo Jacinto.

So, even though we can easily be overwhelmed by the unpredictability of the particular movement of this space, it is not so much the strangeness that strikes us – specially for those who know well and recognize Ricardo Jacinto’s work and his vocabulary – but rather the curiosity about the logic behind this construction and about the archeology that sustains and, in a certain way, reveals it.

Maria Joana Vilela