With this current exhibition, named “Reflexão do Lugar”, the plastic artist Trindade Vieira (born in Madeira), gives continuity to the reflection route where the thematic of the place crosses with its relation with the ontology of the substance. This thematic is an artistic approach that this same author have been privileging and that can be seen on other works, already presented, as for example, the exposition “Contemplação Topográfica” (Funchal 2004).
This time, the author analyses certain landscapes that are registered on his personal universe, using and transforming them in compositions that provides the spectator a certain entrance gate for a new space – a space that is more to reflection than to contemplation, demanding, this way the presence of an active and determined spectator.The works of this exposition interrupts us, like if they were asking about the complexity of the web that spins between the life and the places where it occurs. The question that Trindade Vieira seems to raise is, if we are not (all of us) a strange place. A place that is wonder at first, and wonder after?
Departing from the initial decomposition, from the deconstruction of the artist personal geography, the current exposition succeeds to put in evidence the structures that could be defined as elementary, but that most of the time, it escapes from us, when we look to our resigned reality laid in front of us and conditioned by time and geography.
By decomposing this reality on overlays, Trindade Vieira alerts us for a multiple dimension of our existence, helping us to exceed the physical or material reality, at the same time that sends us to the place of reflection of the Being.
Trindade Vieira invites us to go beyond (pure) Geography of the Space and establish what we would call Geography of the Existence. Instead of a drifted place, the author offers us an anchored place that stands on his own personal universe and appeals to the colours and to the invariances that can be found on it (banana trees, houses, fields, colours).
So, the works here presented are assumed as a bridge between the universal geography and the place of ontological interrogation, a place where each person asks about interior places – non representable – of each one of us. Besides, Trindade Vieira succeeds, on a sibylline way, on appealing to a (plastic) metonymic, that beyond identifying the author and his universe, seems to go on the direction of a dilemma, from which another knowledges – Philosophy and Biology – have been studying through the years, but on their own language of course. On other words, what seems to be in question is the following: is the place an expression from what we are, or it’s the place that defines our content (interior) and our expression (exterior).
The inquisitive look that Trindade Vieira has been privileging trough his artistic career comes strongly connected with this problematic. Expression and content are not always in the same place. Beyond the inquisitive metonymic already referred, what is revealed now to the public is, once more, a metaphor. At abandoning the structure of his personal geography, the author offers us a more complex vision – I would even say, more honest – of the life that goes through his interior. On Trindade Vieira works, the non-places succeed the real and physical places, giving through its course and on a sibylline form, a chance to an answer. If the geography defines tout cour, our existence, then the non-places correspond to the non-existences. Anyway, more than offering us his personal perspective, Trindade Vieira keeps focused on the dialectic, always difficult to define or to conceive, between the universe of the place and the universe of the existence. In a world like ours, that is on constant change, where the physical frontiers seem to be on a continuous dissolution, the works here reunited in “Reflexão do Lugar” are useful clues to the comprehension of our own contemporaneity.
Sérgio Benedito
