ARTIST STATEMENT

 

Untitled (B.B.4) develops the constructive poetic themes found in Rui Sanches’s work since the 1980’s. Using wood and its derivates (laminates, agglomerates and plywood) as prime material, the artist explores concepts associated with the physical behaviour of these materials and their arrangement within the physical space. Balance, weight, and the relation between symmetry and dissymmetry, or between compression and expansion, the counterpoint between geometric regularity and irregularity of organic shapes are freely explored through the constitution of bodies or masses, by accumulation, sedimentation or piling, namely of strata or agglomerate segments, as can be seen in the suggestive treatment of the three heads of this artwork. These are presented as conglomerates sculpted by erosion or resulting from a process of mobile geological sedimentation. While formally placed on pillar-shaped volumes, these figures do not present a front or a back, but are instead projected from the cavities and protuberances from the wood itself. Movement is thus integrated as a dimension inherent to the artworks themselves, a virtual kinetic suggested in the static of the matter itself (wood, its tessitura and plates of oriented configurations).

 

On one hand, the reconstruction of a generic anthropomorphic, non-mimetic, identity, and, on the other hand, the questioning of the historical practice of commemorative art and sculpture – underlined, in this artwork, by the use of the very conventional head shape on a high plinth – are aspects that have converged on Rui Sanches’s creative practice, in the permanent dialogue that the artist has established with Nature’s earthy or organic shapes, as much as with the shapes originated by human reason and imagination throughout time.

 

Ana Filipa Candeias

 

November 2011