PARALLAX
Susana Rocha
Galeria de Arte Moderna
Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes
07.09 __ 15.10.2022
PHOTO Bruno Lopes
Parallax: “Difference in the apparent position of an object relative to a background,
as seen by observers at different locations or by an observer in motion”
PARALLAX is a project that freely explores the “errors of vision”, through pictorial and sculptural objects that force the spectator to move, transposing the idea of distortion and visual perspective to a wider universe: a metaphor for the human experience and the mistakes it entails.
Without looking for the mere verification or reproduction of visual disorders, the works which are part of PARALLAX seek to question what we assume as certain, observable, reliable, or stable... with the certainty that in life entropy is the evident trend.
Exploring deviations and setbacks, but also discoveries and the enchantment of the gaze, the exhibition proposes a straying understanding of the human need to move forward; to discover new positions without the comfort of predictability.
Form, the rational stronghold of artistic practice, asserts itself as a challenge, allying with color as a provocation of the senses. Even so, the works are born from minimal gestures, in the search for resonance within the retina of those who observe them - a look also evoked as a formal reference.
Contradicting a narrow formalism, I look for the poetics of concepts and the possibility of extrapolation, which the character of each title also encloses.
Susana Rocha
The author Susana Rocha, artist if you prefer, tries to create a body of intention and realization, whose presented results – her Works – are meditated in depth, worked from the construction of a concept.
The concepts she works on, escape any mimicry of the real, but they still refer to it, albeit obliquely, so to speak, asking the spectator to pay particular attention.
This inter-subjective dialogue appears even in pieces by the author of linear design, such as those that are part of the curatorship that she presents at the Bienal de Cerveira in its most recent edition (2022). The pieces in question cut out the adjacent space as much as they define it.
At one point in her interview, the artist refers to Heidegger, as I quote from Mafalda de Faria Blanc, in her well-founded “Studies on Heidegger”, page 286, Guerra & Paz, 2018: “It can thus be said that the world, as a horizon of meaning, has its first expression and implantation in the poetic-thinking configuration of languages”.
I believe this is exactly the way they proceed: to create a new language. In PARALLAX, her solo exhibition at the Galeria de Arte Moderna da Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, the author explores the concept/definition of the term: “difference in the apparent position of an object in relation to a background, as seen by observers at different locations or by a moving observer.
The surrounding pieces, in their relativized silence, request the active participation of the non-exactly spectator, in conceptual complicity through phenomena of vision that give the measure of the instability of the World and the need for its permanent reformulation.
Jaime Silva