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Floating Machines #43
Overview
2019
Acrylic and oil on canvas
Unique Work
Dimensions: 60cm (H) x 60cm (W) x 4cm (D) / 23.6" (H) x 23.6" (W) x 1.6" (D)
Note: Actual colours may vary due to photography & computer settings.
Artist Statement
Floating Machines
Scrawl in the air. First I sketch the big insect carcass with my arms. Then I rehearses his movement, his blind march, his groping forewarned. Curve to curve I draw the fuselage of this ingenious machine in urgent transformation. Enigmatic structure, articulated and fragile, with bandages and hinges that crack, amber bones and long legs that never end, hands that dredge the depth. And these magnificent constructions, which are rebuilt and adapted, which are released from essential physics, may be migrating birds, they may be ancestral fish; these constellations of wire, bits of meteor, planks, and human strength, sail, sail in the most rarefied purpose, in the most absolute of desires, in the most uncertain of destinies, but sail … guided by the waves of the sea, by the false maps of the empires, by the unnamed winds.
For a moment they lie down on the smoothness of the canvas, they show themselves, expecting seductively and impatiently; dragonflies of fog in bridal court, flapping wings. We enter into their warm, pulsating, irrigated stomachs, living caves resonating; volatiles, levitate stretching the ropes that hold them to the safe ground. Some loose, others never, and in this vital bump, rehearse the great flight, the fantastic flight of these enormous creatures, insect-birds, planet-fish, ship-men, of these flying trees.
And in this suspended state, of timeless and free condition, we begin all over again; we flew over the sea, into the mountains, beyond the earth; in them we come again to the new lands, founding cities, planting memories and forgetfulness, sowing poetry.
Fernando Gaspar
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Artist Profile
Born: 1966
Hometown: Lisboa
Based in: Lisboa
Self-taught visual artist. He began his journey through the drawing and practice of watercolor. Fully dedicated to the activity since 1986, the year in which it began to participate in shows and prizes, and to exhibit regularly in the main art galleries of the country, exploring and adopting other supports, materials and techniques.
His first solo exhibition outside Portugal took place in 1995. There have been some National Prizes, collective participations and more than 50 solo exhibitions in Portugal and abroad. Over the years, the plasticity of his work has evolved towards an increasingly reflective and contemporary approach.
Latest Solo Exhibitions: Estoril Casino Art Gallery, Bill Lowe Gallery, António Pascoal Foundation, Hélder Alfaiate Gallery, São Mamede Gallery.
Statement
Of my work it matters the color, the trace, or no more than what is heard from them. It matters what they both say, when together or apart, present or announced, or no more than what looses them. It is important to speak of this life that stretches between two worlds, both new; of the former where we can no longer fit, the new where we stubbornly adapt. It is important to speak of this time, of this catalytic place where everything begins, again. It is important to be, to connect with the hands and the head, the certainty cured to the freshness of the becoming. And from this struggle is done the work. Figuration prevails, or abstraction reigns in defiance of the covenant. It makes clear the origin and in the next moment already wanders almost erratically dismantling the maternal mark in search of wider ways.
For we too are all this, both memory and invention, silence and noise, peace and discord. As a person and as an artist, I feel like this: in between, between.
And my painting or what remains of it, apocathastic, apocalyptic, revealed, thing or nothing, is no more than the visible essay of this being, of this being so. School orphan, wild and stubborn, is born and thriving on the sweet surfaces of the paper, in the tensions of a woven linen, worked stand, palimpsest care as if smoothing the place for a ceremony. One by one, single as the first, as accomplices as a child, are always the sum of what precedes them, ways to open to the next, pieces that do not altogether separate by any universal law. It is an exercise of mine, an intimate thing that makes me understand, in order to understand myself in this kind of delusion, so deliciously.
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