Exhibition
From the third of July to the 10th of October 2004, Le Grand Café in Saint-Nazaire dedicates an important exhibition to the Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis. Very active on the international scene of these last years (Venice Biennale 2003, BALTIC Art Center, Gateshead 2002, Joan Miro Foundation, Barcelona 2002), Pedro Cabrita Reis has nevertheless little exhibited in France.In the 1980’s, he carries out assembly sculptures that take shape of furniture-objects: tables, wardrobes. Progressively, his work gives up the interior space of the house to take over the signs and the materials of architecture. More monumental, his works assemble industrial construction materials (wood, glass, bricks, plaster…) with a minimum amount of means, in this way revealing the whole meaning of the very act of building. For him, architecture replaced nature which used to act as a system of landmark and of measurement.
In his work, the house and the city are metaphors to think the contemporary world which is given to us by fragments. Within the obvious chaos of reality, Pedro Cabrita Reis seems to track down the order hidden, the signs of a human presence, a thought, a rationality. His art works balanced between the building site and the ruin, between power and fragility, between the greatness of intention and the coarseness of every material achievement. For the different spaces of the Grand Café, Pedro Cabrita Reis conceived two specific projects. With Les heures oubliées, the artist proposes a journey in the Grand Café’s inferior space. This project is an invitation to meditation of the time that is passing by, of the memory and seizure of the present time.
At the crossing of drawing, painting and installation, the artist’s intervention on the floor’s walls invites the visitor to go through and gaze at a mental landscape. Une ligne entre le haut et le bas composes a floating and elusive horizon created by neon lighting. Through these two proposals, Pedro Cabrita Reis offers an intimate experience of space, marked by mystery and silence.
