BETWEEN SHAPE AND THE HUMAN FIGURE_Works from the collection
C.A.M._ Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon
18-07-2008–04-01-2009
Curator: Jorge Molder

THE REST IS SILENCE. 2003

Sculpture installation: Epoxy resin, polyester, clothes shoes, mirrors and wood Hamlet when dying, whispers, “-The rest is silence”. This is the title of Noé Sendas Installation. At the same time as the artists deepens the exploration of Shakespearean characters, he also evolves in his complex network between litterateur and contemporary art. These two figures evoke real encounters fulfilled with long, almost absolute, silences that we know to have happened between James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Incorporating the wisdom of silence that fulfils the oeuvre of these two authors of torrential words, who were very aware of one’s loss in the magic power of the word, and understanding in parallel that the images need to go back to the beginning of times, to a violent language that Nauman so well presents us, to regain meaning. It is through all these wires that the artist connects the links between specific literary references, the generic cultural references and the visual arts milieu. Still we have to think of John Cage here, as another linking element of these strategies of silence (as a blindness and a muteness capable to lead to the wisdom). After subverting the Canon of “conversation piece” as a historical gender Noé Sendas unknots its antinomy through placing the two mirrors facing the back of each of the two chairs, allowing the reunification (fusing) of the two characters in a symbolic circularity (the black hair of one becomes white towel of the other and vice versa). The crystalline pureness here is born out of an impurity state. But it is the same pureness that we can find in the essentiality of a geometric piece… the rest is silence.

Text by Joao Pinharanda