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

OUTSIDE_51 Artists living abroad
Curator: Joao Pinharanda
09.06-30.09.2008
Museu da Presidência da República_Viana do Castelo_Portugal

THE COLLECTOR. 2007
Photographs: C-Print mate on Alu-Dibond 3 mm. 21 x (75x75cm).

The project is inspired by a passage in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40): “The collector… brings together what belongs together; by keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time, he can eventually furnish information about his objects…. As far as the collector is concerned, his collection is never complete; for let him discover just single piece missing and everything he has collected remains a patchwork.” Informed by these words, the works on view are a collection of self-portraits, thought which Sendas examines this historical mode of introspection derived from artistic way of live as an iconographic device, with particular reference to the self-portraits of canonical artists from the Renaissance to the present. (…) The self-portrait images are cut and pasted in elegant combinations that evoke modernist aesthetics–for example, Sarah Lucas and Velásquez, Velásquez and Durer, Durer and Mapplethorpe. Andy Warhol’s face meets that of the Portuguese Aurélia de Sousa, while Bruce Nauman can be found in a pairing with Goya that possesses a rare, albeit, grotesque, beauty. In deconstructing and reconfiguring these well-known faces of Western art, Sendas satisfies his iconoclastic impulse.

ARTFORUM, October 2007, text by Miguel Amado, 2007