Patrícia Garrido was born in 1963. She lives and works in Lisbon. She studied Painting at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes in Lisbon and began to show her work in public in 1988, with a solo exhibition at Galeria Módulo, in Porto.

Her work, always marked by its individual scale, is founded in a strong demarcation of the artist herself; we get to know her through the measurements of her body, her footsteps, the colours of her make-up, her clothes, some of her eating habits, plants from the houses she lived in, the spaces she adopts and makes her own, but, in reality, from all these works with an autobiographical register Patrícia Garrido removes any interpretative content, constructing a disquieting paradox with that over-exposed and undecipherable identity. The centre of the world and of herself, a place of personal and universal reflection, the idea of home forms the basis of her research, becoming the almost constant theme of her relationship with the world.

In 2009, the artist embarked on fieldwork in which she surveyed the interiors of buildings, public and private, bringing together and selecting that raw material and beginning its transformation. Her parents’ furniture, the furnishings of the António Arroio secondary arts school, some single pieces with indistinct identities, such as tables or chairs, or the contents of anonymous houses found on online sales sites, thus become the raw material of a violent operation. The artist takes all these parts with the identity of someone who has used and experienced them and fragments them meticulously in order to use them all in another form of life.

The strength of these sculptures lies in the exposure of a mysterious energy, resulting from the brutal act of cutting, piling, distributing, fitting and sticking, with no waste, all those pieces of wood, iron, Formica and fabric, into the smallest space possible, until she finds the perfect form, closed and sealed, to which the artist gives the (mathematical) name furniture cubed. To put it another way, these are the signs of the passage of life, the echoes and breaths that are kept forever. It isn’t a sum, synthesis or summary; in this plan of rearrangement we find something that sits between mathematics, geometry and philosophy, that ponders the place of things and people in the world, combining the rigour of construction with the abstract capacity for thought. The solutions are strictly visual, using maximum information to minimal effect. In this powerful territory of strangeness, built from the most utilitarian elements of humankind’s relationship with places, Patrícia Garrido develops a relentless exercise on the helplessness of the human condition and its passage through the world.

Mobília em 30 cm (30 cm Furniture) is part of this series of inhabited interiors (20 cm Furniture, 40 cm… and 10 cm…) that nevertheless undo this enclosed logic, break this source and bring into view another dynamic within the space. Also cellular, this new order, based on precisely the same matter, recovers a space of freedom in which to breathe. Sticking to the rules of a pre-defined level (height) and development on the ground, for whichever ground to which they adapt and with an orthogonal positioning, these bodies of fragments advance invasively in an irregular and disquieting conquest with no predictable end.

Helena de Freitas
Curator at Centro de Arte Moderna