Pedro Cabrita Reis
True Gardens #3 (Dijon)
17 April – 05 May 2004
Opening: Friday, April 16, 6 pm
Frac Bourgogne
49 rue de Longvic,
F21000 Dijon, France
Phone + 33 (0) 3 80 6718 18
Fax. + 33 (0) 3 80 66 33 29
E-mail infos [at] frac-bourgogne.org
Free guided visit:
Saturday, May 15 at 3 pm at the Frac
The Burgundy Regional Contemporary Art Collection [FRAC Bourgogne] has invited the artist Pedro Cabrita Reis to design a new installation, as part of its consistent line of thinking about the many different ways in which contemporary artists see space and place. This Portuguese artist, who embarked on his career in the mid-1980s, appropriates materials and signs from architecture to produce a fragmented perception of reality, and contribute energy and mystery to everyday life and apparently commonplace things. True Gardens #3 (Dijon) reveals the complete dimension of this many-facetted work, made up of inwardness and silence.
Pedro Cabrita Reis makes works (sculptures, paintings, installations) which posit human activity as a fragile balance between a powerful spiritual aspiration and the triviality of making. Their mysterious and silent presence is thus produced by the assembly of industrial construction materials–timber, bricks, plaster… The on-going reference to architecture is seen as a way of living in the world, and adapting to contemporary reality.
True Gardems #3 (Dijon) has been made specifically for this exhibition, and is the third work to be shown under this title. The first version was produced for the exhibition at the Le Crestet Art Centre in 2000. A collection of mirrors interrupted by two enameled panels was placed on a wooden platform in a patio. This work, set in the very heart of architecture, revealed the link between the site and its natural environment, and evolved with changes in the sky, reflected in it, thus establishing an explicit reference to painting.
For the second version in 2001, the relationship to the structure of the place shifted inwards. In the main room at the Magasin 3 Art Centre in Stockholm, caissons were placed on the floor, and covered with painted panes of glass, through which the light from neons was diffused.
Through the balanced volumes and the nature of the light, the work took possession of the place, from floor to ceiling, revealing its architectural signs.
For True Gardens #3 (Dijon), the light from neons once again punctuates the space, but this time attention is focused on the circuit proposed by the various elements. The installation takes possession of the entire volume, with no apparent rules, and in a deliberately random way, based on modules which corrupt the place.
The artist assembles salvaged materials with a minimum of means, thus revealing the whole meaning of the act of constructing. That of the quest for an invariably precarious equilibrium between the memory of what has been and is today bygone, and the capacity of that memory to grasp the present.
The garden, symbol of Paradise in both writings and old painting, is here referred to a reality in which architecture has replaced nature as a way of making the world comprehensible. By their mental dimension and their powerful presence, the works of Pedro Cabrita Reis thus relate to a form of absolute, and a radical absence.
This exhibition was made possible through the support of the Minister of Culture (DRAC: Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs of Burgundy) and the General Council of the Cote d’Or.
