Lara Lisboa Portela // Esculturas de terra, água, fogo, ar VII.

 «Everything leads to believe there is a certain place in the psyche, where life and death, reality and imagination,past and future, communication and non communication stop being perceived as a contradiction .»
André Breton

Constructing images of Poiesis, Nuno Vicente is an artist that more than working about Nature, thinks and experiences it through his work.
His practice points towards the transience of being conversely stating it as eternal, within a constant dialogue between matter and immateriality, between what is visible and what is intangible.
Sculptures made of earth, fire, water, air (part VII) completes a cycle of works focusing upon the four elements, being this the most tangible of his projects with a clear commitment to Nature.
Instilled with Poiesis, this is a primordial and symbolic nature, present in a fossilized tree leaf as in the diaries translated through morse code. Action is the propeller of this narrated time, materialized through natural cycles. The remote place which has, by chance, been imprinted on the rock‘s surface – the fossil – a time capsule – is consequently found and commercialized. Gravity – Fossils of Leaves Hanged in a Forest is a return (giving back) to nature, as in Homage to Ilya Prigogine – Skype Rocking of Fossils onto Water. Nature does not exhaust or stagnates, it continues it‘s inexorable path, independent from human intervention – time mutates into matter.
It is within a time construct that this sculptures come to fruition: actions that testimony a course of events, it‘s repercussion and poetic resonance. The photographic panel that constitutes Homage to Ilya Prigogine – Skype Rocking of Fossils onto Water, freezes a fleeting moment, just before it vanishes, reminding us of the gravity forces that pull our bodies towards the earth core. In Gravity – Fossils of Leaves Hanged in a Forest one can see a similar movement of fall as a return, albeit registering the static moment, once that the instant of the fall becomes aleatory and suggested by elements, external to the action itself.
The Big Fossil systematizes time, matter and action: it refers to a deep geological time, solidifying matter and confronting us with primordial actions. Grinding fossils is akin to food grains as it is to pigments employed for cave paintings. This painting, made with pigments resulting from the grinding of 25 leaves of trees fossils, ground daily throughout the course of a few months, seems to distort representation by overcoming it. Reduced to two dimensions and apparently monochromatic, these 25 trees matter constructs a certain geography, remitting us almost to a ground zero of purity, thus evoking the supremacy of pure sentiment, present in Malevitch‘s White on White. In its temporality, duration, permanence, infinity, nature is used to reaffirm the impermanence of being and The Big Fossil is reliant on human intervention for its continuity.
If the daily writings are to be understood as registers of a past time and matter, we return to reaccess the action, which again flows on it‘s natural course when it‘s returned to ether through electric signals in Diary notes – 12 Thoughts on Nature Translated into Electric Signs Sent to the Air. The diary, which so often follows the artists work, defining a methodology of fragments in perpetuity, often points again to the passage of time, through a frozen moment. These writings, translated in morse code, become remarks/thoughts from nature observations, asserting human nature as integral to it. This might well be the reason why texts appear coded, and despite being made “available” it‘s access becomes impeded by the use of a less familiar alphabet.

Lara Lisboa Portela
2014