Created in 1987, Sem Título – Barco Partido (Untitled – Broken Boat) is a large ground sculpture (4 metres in length) made from white limestone in a horizontal oblong format. This piece fits into a cycle of assembled carved stonework developed by Manuel Rosa during the 1980s and continued in the 1990s. It was taken to the 20th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil, in 1989. The sculpture, which is asymmetrical and decentred on its base plates (which also have a broken, asymmetrical quality), presenting parts of the hull and structure visible between sections of unfinished stone, calls for a poetic reflection on the process-orientated character of sculptural act (i.e. the fact that it is intentional, controlled by will and consciousness, but simultaneously contingent or accidental). We are referred from form to formlessness and from the formless to the form. The boat is nevertheless a pure representation, a form with a function – if set against the symbolisation of motion in space and time – is presented in abeyance: a negative, absolute impossibility.

CAM’s Sem Título can be placed in parallel with another "boat" in storage at the Serralves collection – its inverted double. This second sculpture is the outer hull, with its visible careening line emerging from limestone parallelepipeds – prepared blocks with their upper surface left rough. Both works highlight a line of investigation common to many of Manuel Rosa’s works during this creative period: the attempt (an insurmountable paradox) to shape transient and ephemeral motion in stone (through fractures, assembly, carving marks). In this process, Rosa improvises freely with scale, form and function (the move from formlessness to form as a way of evoking the primordial genesis of sculpture, as well as of all creation), using a very common material in the Portuguese landscape: limestone.

Ana Filipa Candeias

May 2013