Week 172_THE THEORY OF CLOUDS

THE THEORY OF CLOUDS

featuring Aires de Gameiro, Nuno Ferreira, Pedro Cabrita Paiva and Primeira Desordem

30.03.2019 - 19.04.2019

OPENING: 29.03.2019 h.18.00 – 21.0

Buona Sera, Via Carena 20, 10144 Torino, Italia

From every theory of clouds, the most exciting I came across was that of the relation between the atomic bomb and the Internet. The atomic bomb has triggered the development of a non-centred communication system that appeared to us in the shape of the Internet. The cloud of the bomb explosion is historically attached to the way our lives are taken by the inhuman speed of subjectivation, created by the marriage of different velocities between the machines and us. Triggered by clouds drawn on the walls in this space, I feel tempted to use the idea of cloud to name the nature of this exhibition. One can also see the works here presented as a cloud itself. I see it as a cloud in the way that allows me to project my dreams, lying down here in bed as if I was lying on the grass. I see the cloud as being dark and heavy because I'm possessed by thoughts attached to the Anthropocene, the suicidal tendencies of capitalism, the genocide of life that humans carry due to their privilege and stupidity.

When one looks at this dark cloud and tries to analyze it, one sees that it is composed of a multitude of possibilities. It is somehow holding a disaster, a production made without a centre ( dis astro ). From down here, life gets destroyed of any full meaning. There is no horizon, no future, and later is now - as Bernard Aspe posed in his eponymous text, like in Cormack McCarthys’s romance "The road". These considerations propose certain cyberpunk aesthetics, which are implicit by me. I face the danger of aesthetic seduction by post-apocalyptic considerations as opposed to creating awareness within me. Within the darkness of the cloud, one has a positive work to rescue oneself from the imprisonment of the present - that of Presentism: the impossibility of living the present in full, with the future colonized by many forces that act as a mortgage.

Art has the capacity to create a here and now . Present is given by art through the feeling of the arrival of the future, or the passage of the future, by the present. Art is a given future, because one needs to offer oneself to something that in potency will become art in us. Art happens within this delivery of ourselves to that art to become. This exhibition is composed by works of Pedro Cabrita Paiva, Primeira Desordem, Nuno Ferreira and Aires de Gameiro. Cabrita Paiva’s clouds are made with a homemade gadget. This apparently superfluous machine produces endless variations on a drawing that is dreamy, happy and light-hearted. Its repetition on the walls of the space produces a sort of wallpaper that reminds me of the proto-psychedelic qualities of patterns, the 60's and more precisely “Nuage à surface variable, 1971” by René Bertholo (1935-2005, PT), where metallic clouds are moving by a motor.

There is, in fact, a precise relation between the motor-motioned metal shaped clouds and the implied movement to these clouds drawing. And that is not implied just by the motor itself on both works, but by the production of dreams with clumsy, cheap or simple, available-to-all devices. Art is a mental trap that produces the ingenuity that enhances us to see something beyond language and its entrapment, to relate new things or create a new sensation that could be produced by these drawings, by their position and repetition, or even just by the way it removes you from the quotidian by giving you another time, thus slowing you down. These thoughts are reinforced by a breeze that crosses the exhibition space and affects all the elements in this show.

The breeze is not actual wind but a video by Primeira Desordem, where a book produces wind by flipping its pages against the face of oneself. Its silliness can also be seen as dramatic, through the replacement of the natural over the artificial or the simple use of a book to our satisfaction, while not being aware of its content. This reminds me of firewalls and physical walls we are imposing on ourselves and against others. The wind is consonant with the clouds in the way it connects all works.

• Hugo Canoilas