In this exhibition, Raul Mour\u00e3o once more devotes himself to the difficult marriage of construction and chance. Careful not to override each other, the entwined tensions engender through taut interplay solutions that reject judgements of decision or classification.<\/p>\n
Thus, with such destabilizing interconnections, Mour\u00e3o\u2019s works convey familiarity with the principles of printmaking without however being defined by reproducibility. Mour\u00e3o borrows procedures from monotyping, but his images do not emerge from the usual process of painting on the surface of what is often a sheet of glass, subsequently pressed against paper. It would be too little to say they share an affinity with stamps. Nor are they completely alien from the procedures of painting. Mour\u00e3o\u2019s work is not about choosing this or that surface, this or that material, or even this or that pigment. It is not the definition of a technique that is paramount: all efforts are directed toward the experimentation of technical possibilities, from which solutions will burst out to engender new problems to be resolved later.<\/p>\n
A critical review overly concerned with classifications would also find it challenging to define the conjunction of straight lines and the fluid abstraction of space between them. Even as we are faced with Mour\u00e3o\u2019s frugal economy, how to speak of minimalism when his methods are not hidden away in his works, but rather embrace unpredictability, prizing imperfection? Or how to define his work as informal, when we are offered rigorous construction of planes and geometric arrangements?<\/p>\n
Abstraction in the works of Raul Mour\u00e3o has always been based on indistinct and problematic dynamics at play. Mour\u00e3o after all, takes his geometry from day-to-day objects, such as building facades, soccer fields, railings and signs from public worksites. If, during his career, Mour\u00e3o aspired towards progressively freer formal arrangements, at the same time he never hid from view the memory of his research processes rooted in the everyday experience of city life. This has led to a form of recognizable abstraction, one that is contaminated by bodily, symbolic, emotional experiences, individual and collective reminiscences. In other words, we are looking at impure geometry.<\/p>\n
Earlier works from Ch\u00e3o Parede Gente (Lurixs 2010) had taken that direction. And this new exhibition brings greater depth to those issues. Looking at the window-sculptures we see that Mour\u00e3o continues investigations that, while unceasing, are not linear. Mour\u00e3o\u2019s steel sculptures at first suggested an urban chronicle or sociological commentary in as far as they displayed the aesthetic situation that was born of a crisis in public security: the overpowering and indiscriminate use of bars and railings for protection. His sculptures came out of a process of de-functionalization, their lines and volumes dimmed due to utility. Over the past few years however, Mour\u00e3o has moved towards more classic abstraction, closer to the works of Amilcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann or even Calder. In the sculptures on show at LURIXS, bars have exited the focus of interest, abstraction has also retreated, offering us instead, something prosaic and recognizable, something that they had prevented us from seeing: the windows themselves. What we have before us is invention, and an invented architecture that is fragmentary and mobile, it dances thanks to kinetic matter that brings back to us spectators, to our eyes, and touch, states of weight, volume, movement, balance, time and value.<\/p>\n
What draws our attention here is less the functionality or usefulness of things than their situation or ontological nature. Mour\u00e3o\u2019s gaze is turned above all to the apparent intelligibility of shapes, as if they spoke directly to us. His ensemble of works \u2013 sculptures, drawings, painting, prints, videos, installations, performances- always scoured subjectivities in action, in permanent coincidence with the real space in which they move. Since however cities do not separate themselves from their inhabitants and vice-versa, there is no real interest to be found in landscapes or time and space contingencies treated as mere background: shapes pulled out from cities are important in as far as they allow us a vision of the memory of social practices. For that reason, instead of pure forms we have an impure geometry, it is not abstraction strictly speaking nor is this a case of mere figurative art.<\/p>\n
Looking at Mour\u00e3o\u2019s \u201cstamps\u201d we experience the illusion that there is something to be seen in the in-between spaces, the intervals, created by the window frames as if there were something to look through to, an outside. Is there something to see outside? Is there an inside and an outside? Our eyes tend to see something, want to see something. Mour\u00e3o knows that and teases us. Almost inevitably we are reminded of Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Rear Window. In the film, windows exist because of what can be seen through them: a world where the old bourgeois privacy dissolved as middle class clustered promiscuously together in apartment buildings. It is a gaze that delves, indiscretely, into narratives, facts, into the intimacy of others. By refusing that content, Raul Mour\u00e3o creates windows, and doors, that are facts in themselves. Or even, concentrates on surfaces, creating a universe that lacks another side, it is bottomless, and there is no inside-out. I recall the Portuguese poet Sophia de Melo Breyner Andresen, who mentions the \u201cvehemence of the visible\u201d. Raul Mour\u00e3o\u2019s every gesture seems to look for this type of total presence.<\/p>\n
We are a world apart from the effects of the trompe l \u0301oeil. With no desire to imitate reality, but quite the opposite, Raul Mour\u00e3o\u2019s works are an effort to make the eye see. Even when Mour\u00e3o recreates the LURIXS Gallery fa\u00e7ade windows inside the main exhibition area – his aim is not to make visitors feel they are inside a (false) reality. Instead of feigned reality, visitors experience a displacement, an estrangement and are made to ponder, sharpening their perception. All is what it seems: form, texture, color, weight, volume, movement, density, rhythm, memory. Each construction has the \u201cvehemence of the visible\u201d. Instead of sleight of hand, we are faced with a lucid play, with the playful proposition of an art that will return us the pleasure of seeing things, and our own selves, in new situations. Thus by rejecting illusion, tricks, and falsity, Raul Mour\u00e3o reaffirms the ethical and political dimension of his work even here, in this new exhibition whose works are at a considerable distance from those that carried a more explicit political statement.<\/p>\n
Duchamp\u2019s 1920 Fresh Widow steel multiples created a curious historic line, since they at once recovered the ready-mades (a key strategy in Mour\u00e3o\u2019s work) and the historicity of objects -in this case the window- in the history of architecture and the discursive fields that adopted it as a privileged sign. In much the same way, Mour\u00e3o\u2019s various versions of window frames remind us of the cubist grid or concrete art. In this sense it is possible to detect a clear critical and metalinguistic aspect that prevails over the entire exhibition \u2013 the drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs (as far as it is possible to use such definitions) \u2013whose subjective expression reveals aspects of philosophical commentary, both on Raul Mour\u00e3o\u2019s singular poetics \u2013 there are many echoes here of his obsessions \u2013 as well as of (his own) history of art, always understood as, to use an expression by Giulio Carlo Argan, \u201cstoria dell\u2019arte come della citt\u00e0\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Eucana\u00e3 Ferraz for the FENESTRA exhibition March 2015 Version by Lis Horta Moriconi In this exhibition, Raul Mour\u00e3o once more devotes himself to the difficult marriage of construction and chance. Careful not to override each other, the entwined tensions engender through taut interplay solutions that reject judgements of decision or classification. Thus, with suchContinue reading →<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[65],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3009"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3011,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3009\/revisions\/3011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.raulmourao.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}