Pedro Cabrita Reis possesses a complex oeuvre, encompassing a variety of media: painting, drawing, and sculpture composed of both found and manufactured objects. Often employing the simplest materials from the lexicon and leftovers of building and construction - long, strip florescent light bulbs, rusting steel girders, salvaged work tables, double glazed vitrines, decaying wooden doors, clay brick, or aluminium tubing - his works explore laden relationships between space, architecture, and memory.
Concerned with the evocative potential of the architectural fragment, the artist's three-dimensional works, including 'Meeting Point' (2004) and 'True Gardens #4' (2005), seek to both paint and construct: to use the formal and perceptual qualities of the painting to suggest the contingency of construction and the human urge to develop signification from the most abstract elements. In 'Meeting Point', the large linear work, composed of steel girders interrupted by both a window whose glass pane is three-fourths covered in yellow paint and a found work table, has a disturbing quality; the penetration of the table's structure and the obscured vision of the window imply a violent, if unseen, narrative and emotional space. In "True Gardens # 4", presented on the floor as a representation of an artificial pool - a pool of light - the affective and ambiguous quality of the artist's work manifests through the material: fluorescent lights. The artist states, "The fluorescent tube already has, as an object, a quality of melancholy embedded in it... They belong to lost alleys, suburban places, factories where people are exploited, a history of exploitation and oblivion." In both pieces, as the materials either found or fabricated import their own histories or connotations, abstraction dissolves into reference with a poetry that is all Cabrita Reis's own.
"Alberti saw painting as a window on the world, and I have turned that window into a mirror," comments Cabrita Reis. For his exhibition at Haunch of Venison, London (2005), the artist completed a climatic set of five large-scale, monochrome paintings, composed in sombre green, brown, black, blue and oxblood textiles. The highly reflective glass, which encases the works, and which might suggest transparency, presents an opacity to vision: though we want to see through it, to the work, instead we see only ourselves. In these seemingly abstract works, the resultant reflection speaks to the inevitability of representation, as the resultant field of vision, impenetrable, reflects back to the viewer his (or her) own image. These works are about the ways and powers of seeing, the contingency and construction of vision. They, as with the whole of Cabrita Reis' oeuvre, aim to underline what for the artist is the very power of art: through an understanding of "what we do and how we see things" to "tell us who we are". (...)
Haunch of Venison, London
Pedro Cabrita Reis website
Concerned with the evocative potential of the architectural fragment, the artist's three-dimensional works, including 'Meeting Point' (2004) and 'True Gardens #4' (2005), seek to both paint and construct: to use the formal and perceptual qualities of the painting to suggest the contingency of construction and the human urge to develop signification from the most abstract elements. In 'Meeting Point', the large linear work, composed of steel girders interrupted by both a window whose glass pane is three-fourths covered in yellow paint and a found work table, has a disturbing quality; the penetration of the table's structure and the obscured vision of the window imply a violent, if unseen, narrative and emotional space. In "True Gardens # 4", presented on the floor as a representation of an artificial pool - a pool of light - the affective and ambiguous quality of the artist's work manifests through the material: fluorescent lights. The artist states, "The fluorescent tube already has, as an object, a quality of melancholy embedded in it... They belong to lost alleys, suburban places, factories where people are exploited, a history of exploitation and oblivion." In both pieces, as the materials either found or fabricated import their own histories or connotations, abstraction dissolves into reference with a poetry that is all Cabrita Reis's own.
"Alberti saw painting as a window on the world, and I have turned that window into a mirror," comments Cabrita Reis. For his exhibition at Haunch of Venison, London (2005), the artist completed a climatic set of five large-scale, monochrome paintings, composed in sombre green, brown, black, blue and oxblood textiles. The highly reflective glass, which encases the works, and which might suggest transparency, presents an opacity to vision: though we want to see through it, to the work, instead we see only ourselves. In these seemingly abstract works, the resultant reflection speaks to the inevitability of representation, as the resultant field of vision, impenetrable, reflects back to the viewer his (or her) own image. These works are about the ways and powers of seeing, the contingency and construction of vision. They, as with the whole of Cabrita Reis' oeuvre, aim to underline what for the artist is the very power of art: through an understanding of "what we do and how we see things" to "tell us who we are". (...)
Haunch of Venison, London
Pedro Cabrita Reis website