AND TIME
Society is structured through narratives, immaterial arguments as such, which are translated into ways of living, relationships, organizations and ideologies. We live inside these narratives.
The narratives of artistic works portray embodied forms of more or less implicit community arguments: as well as everyday objects, be it technological equipment, a television program or a brand that induces us to certain comportments and promote collective values, global visions of the world. The frontier between fiction and information - and which Liam Gillick questions in his works, redistributes the two notions from the concept of the social point of view, is revealed in multiple ways that point to a world aesthetic built on the study of information systems. ideological control.
In PRODUÇÃO (RE) PRODUÇÃO, Martim Brion does not expose a “happy end” of a process, but rather a production space where the visitor has the artist's tools for a free visual mixture, a research scenario in real time and (re)production, the observer builds the narrative to the rhythm of his look, and the image he projects in his subconscious.
Reproducing what has already been produced is an extraordinary task.
Not starting again from scratch, nor from the accumulated knowledge of an artistic language, but selecting and interpreting, serving and sharing. Martim Brion, through small sculptures on the wall and photographs of different formats - materials that remind us of conceptual art from the 60s, presents a deciphered narrative mobility, reinvented and with an inevitable alternative interpretation, as an unconscious that tries to escape from the fatality of history, an inversion of the collective discourse into a individual tool.
In the exhibition space, similar to a container of visual instruments, it is up to the spectator to create relationships with the world, and to materialize in one way or another the relationship with space, adding time.
What loss were ours, if we had known not birth?
…whoso ne’er hath tasted life’s desire.
Unborn, impersonal, can feel no dearth.
Lucretius
As artists we produce work. What one means by production has shifted overtime, as have the methods for art making, the word itself, production, which comes from the latin producere, to bring forth, has shifted from manually crafting something to more often meaning an industrial process with well-defined and planned inputs and outputs. Art has shifted accordingly. New means of production have thus been added to the toolbox of creation, while old ones remain, even if some techniques, such as traditional drawing are becoming more niche and thus disappearing from mainstream artistic practise, sometimes with a negative impact when it is a central part of this practise. But, overall, one could argue that the new methods have expanded the possibility for creation. Is this creation worth this expansion? As with everything, some is and some is not, even Sewell would agree that there is quality to be found in contemporary art albeit mostly folly, but as with everything, time is the great critic and selector. How will this art be defined/appreciated in 100 years it is impossible to tell. The only possibility is to continue the best one can. An important component of this practise is repetition (mechanical), the more one paints, or sculpts or reads, the better one's capacity for performing said act; this coupled with a plethora of other factors, is critical to becoming an artist with his/her own individual approach, one avoids unique, as unique is a tall order to be attained, and once again, time needs to be factored in. All of this linked to freedom, freedom of creation, and freedom of living, but this topic one will leave it to von Klist’s puppet.
Production stems from creation; in order to create something, one must first have an idea; once that idea is formed, one needs a method/technique to bring it into the physical realm. Another intriguing aspect of this process is where this idea is located, does it already exist in someone’s head, or is it written somewhere, even if it is on an unknown or inaccessible piece of paper, or might it even exist somewhere in the ether? It is still unclear where these ideas come from; they do not appear out of nowhere; rather, they emerge from a confluence of influences, such as one’s life, empirical study, logical deduction, and so on. Creation is also limited by our sensorial capacity; the day we will be able to access different senses our creative output will take a different form. As a result, we are constantly involved in our own social, civilizational cycle; the human derives the majority of its influence from what it knows, and what it knows best is himself and his fellow humans. Thus, art is what is closest to natural creation with a human behind it, it is aiming at gods work in human terms, even if it is always nothing compared to the natural world because it is only the filtered vision of one individual who is a very small particle in a much wider space. This filtered vision works best when it stems from a large number of influences or inputs rather than just a few. This process is like Schlieffen’s plan, it is toiled and re-toiled and once in motion it is difficult to stop, even when its end result is not satisfactory, there is a high failure rate in this process, just as there is in a non-technological life, a pre-modern life. Is this still the case? Probably, since it is easier nowadays to arrive at a convincing enough idea and to be able to find a method of executing it from the numerous production methods that are now available. Nonetheless, this does not discount many of these ideas as mere fait divers. Which means that at its core, it is still a very pre-modern process, as are we as human beings. It requires constant physical repetition, physical and intellectual, it requires a constant state of alertness as well as being imbued in society and its opinions, from the more lurid to the haughtier ones and a high rate of failure. What never was, may become and what was or is may cease to exist. It is a never-ending cycle of production and re-production, as are we.
This exhibition in Galeria Nave, is the fruition of all this in three parts, Perspective series, Colourscapes and Visions of the Future
Perspectives are geometrical visual approaches, cubes with different patterns of shapes and colour, and further on, the shape itself of the cube is worked on and begins to take a different form. Surfaces that differ slightly. The progression and change of perspectives along a geographical path; the further along this path, the more perspectives diverge. All, however, are descended from the same root, the human.
Colourscapes is an abbreviation for coloured landscapes. Colouring in images is a child's game, and colouring books abound in childhood. They do not limit the child's ability to be creative as they teach that creativity or the process of creation is always built on top of a foundation. Colorscapes represent this incremental build, the need for a solid foundation in order to let one's imagination fly and arrive at a final expression that is expressive, informed, and intellectually honest. This foundation must be taken, but not as our own, because it has been appropriated, or better put, rolled over into something else. We add up the parts to get something bigger.
Visions of the Future – we all want to know what is coming, what the next big investment will be, who will win the war, the game, and so on. It is a wish for an impossibility. It's also an impossibility that adds a lot of spice to life. "Why do something if you know exactly what you're going to do?" Picasso asks, and rightly so. With increasing technology, there is a sense that one is better able to predict the future; a whole segment of society is obsessed with this in all fields. When a major event occurs, people scour the work of those who correctly predicted said event. It is an affliction, or more accurately, a need, that we have had since time immemorial; it stems from the desire to know, to be able to prepare, to be safe, and to thrive. Currently, there is a strong emphasis on this in art, with the clearest example being that everyone seems to know where the Avant Gard lies and with whom. Even though the Avant Gard is only visible after the fact. Picasso was not Picasso as we now know him; he was Picasso only after the fact. Was he heading in that direction? Yes, but so were many others who did not become Picasso; the same is true for everything else. Nothing is predestined, nothing is set in stone, all is fluid, the unexpected happens and everything changes all the time. Is it possible to do predictions, yes, it is, and with big data analysis and other recently developed tools, there are increasingly better ways to model and project into the future, will this bring the future closer? No, it will not, as we are still stuck in the present, carrying the past with us.
Martim Brion