The space – sustaining and contradicting

Structures simultaneously sustain and contradict space. António Bolota’s hipotenusas are heavy and dense wooden lines opposing orthogonality, adding a new discourse to the austerity of the space that shelters them. These works would inevitably end up being synonymous with that austerity as well. Normality, regardless of its composition: the usual, the everyday, what we see always becomes, sooner or later, restraint.

Homogeneity and semantics

As mentioned in the introductory text by Rita Gaspar Vieira, this exhibition is not only a mathematical and geometrical exercise. It is also a lesson about the times we live in. Facing a largely normative society, the opposition is an action that creates new dynamics and movements. Exploring it also semantically: placing these wooden elements generate new angles, within the context of each of the right angles imposed by space – angle; a word that, besides belonging to geometry, also means “way of thinking, understanding, approaching, or observing. = Perspective, Point of view[1]“. Therefore, this artistic project is also an invitation to move and question from a new place, fleeing from standardization.

(Re)drawing

Installing this project, unavoidably associated with an expanded field of drawing, leads us to awaken and return to the roots of this practice. This is also stated by Rita Gaspar Vieira: the visible gesture of redesigning the space opens up parallel thinking that follows, inhabits, and surpasses it. A gesture formally simple at first, rendered complex by the pieces’ monumentality. These new geometries encompass parts of space, adding new dimensions to it, and changing the understanding we have of it. Each hypotenuse adds a boundary, a new dimension, transforming the place, where each element seems to unveil a new way of thinking, opposite to the room’s straightness – an idea that can be supported by the slight formal differences between them.

Hipotenusas, like us

Between the support and connection, the opacity and anthropomorphic dimension of these structures, the spectator’s body, as the motive of the action, is at the center of the proposal. This reminds us that we are the world’s hypotenuses, within that possibility of confronting and connecting, opposing the straightness of everyday thoughts. Ultimately, filling aprioristically unusual voids.

Hipotenusas by António Bolota to visit until June 12.

[1] In the Portuguese online dictionary Priberam