Rui Sanches: Line and Stain, Body and Machine

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DATE

09 Mar 2026

AUTHOR

Ana Isabel Soares

Rui Sanches: Line and Stain, Body and Machine

AUTHOR

Ana Isabel Soares

"The Serralves Foundation fulfills its second collaboration with the Municipality of Lagos with this exhibition. This is an opportunity to discover not only the work of Rui Sanches, but also the ideas underlying the choice of the collections presented and the organizational rigor of the Foundation, as well as the decentralization and expansion of its functions as guardian and exhibitor of contemporary art in Portugal."

In his 2022 introduction to La Tierra Baldía (a Spanish translation and commemorative edition for the centenary of the publication of The Wasteland), Andreu Jaume writes that, due to the many things that have been assumed about T.S. Eliot's poem, it seems to have become “diluido y difuminado” (diluted and diffused) dissolving and clouded in the foam of the history of its reception. But that is not what happened. What happens, Jaume corrects, is that “somos nosotros los que ya no tenemos oído” (we are the ones who no longer hear) – it is we, its readers, its successors, who are losing our hearing capacity. The problem, he asserts, lies with those who read the poem today. The critic uses metaphors to explain this poor reading ability: visual (colors on a palette can become blurred or diluted, for example) and auditory (or the absence of sound, perceived by those who have become hard of hearing). These are metaphors that evoke a synesthetic attitude, just as Eliot's verses compose themselves as they construct a kind of poetic cathedral erected upon dramatic pillars, multimodal sensations, invocations of historical layers, and mixtures of times and scenarios. They are literary (critical) metaphors that project gestures of multidimensional perception, beyond their verbalized existence. The critic mimics the gesture of the poem, because the poem's strength resides in the enchanting and constructive power of the verses: Eliot's words refer, in retrospect, but above all project a creative posterity.

One of the persistent readers of Eliot's poem is Rui Sanches (b. 1954), who finds in The Wasteland one of the axes of his artistic creation – that is, against the usual echo of aridity that critics identify in Eliot, Sanches fulfills the constructive incitement of the poem. But Sanches' reception, to use another metaphor – that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the essay The Poet (published about 80 years before The Wasteland) – has a keen ear for the present moment, it is attuned. The "miswriting" (Emerson's expression) that is his work results from a gesture of transcribing Eliot's verses into contemporaneity in a different materiality, in which nothing is erroneous or failed. Indeed, according to Emerson, "miswriting" is the condition of poetic creation – of artistic creation: an infinite rewriting whose evolutionary line is made through inevitable derivations and deviations. Jaume's accusatory tone regarding current readers of Eliot and their lack of listening skills is, ultimately, a diagnosis of an inescapable situation. There is no lack of listening skills in Rui Sanches' creative attitude, but rather a particularly "tuned" form of mis-hearing that leads to the necessary miswriting, to creation.

This can be witnessed in the works shown in Line and Stain, Body and Engine, which Sanches is exhibiting at the Lagos Cultural Center (CCL) until the beginning of April. There are twenty-nine pieces created between 1984 and 2013, which are part of five collections held on deposit at the Serralves Foundation: three come from the State Collection of Contemporary Art, twelve belong to the Luso-American Foundation for Development, nine to the Leal Rios Foundation, two to the Peter Meeker collection, and one – Alpheus, from 1985 – to an unidentified private collection. None of the drawings that Sanches presented in 2022 at the Miguel Nabinho Gallery, inspired by The Wasteland from 2016 onwards, are included in the collection. But the historical arc that the Lagos exhibition allows reveals the extent to which Eliot's poem has been structured in Sanches' creation. The Wasteland, which the artist presented in 2022, resulted from a plastic concretization of the power of the verses – it was composed of gestures of translation that transposed the verbal energy of the poem into different languages and supports (sometimes integrating verbality into the drawings, i.e., drawing the words – the choice of materials such as graphite was probably not accidental). But this dialogue between distinct materialities is a constitutive part of The Wasteland (poem), whose images incite forms of concretization beyond the lexicon, beyond rhymes, and adapt to artistic spaces such as a stage, a cinema screen, sculptures, or drawings. Now, this permanent movement of transposing other modes, times, and spaces into pictorial and sculptural forms has constituted, from its beginning, the creative environment of Rui Sanches. This is evident in the attention he pays to the “polysemy” he observes in the works of Nicolas Poussin, as he states in the interview with Joana Valsassina included in the booklet accompanying the exhibition: “I was interested in trying again to find [from Poussin] a way of working that had this much denser and more diverse semantic possibility” (p. 15). Still Life (1984), for example, accounts for this density and tensions in the reading of moments that, in the History of Art, offer inexhaustible clues to contemplation, as does the large sculptural installation of 1987, which reinterprets the painting The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David. Similarly, the visitor can glimpse the creative questions that Sanches must have confronted in the creation of the sequence A Marat of which five examples are shown, completed between 1989 and 1990 (four silkscreen prints on which the artist applied industrial enamel and a drawing on paper). Regarding these works, Rui Sanches explains the creative process that led him from numerous interpretations of J.-L. David's eponymous painting, through a staging at Serralves in 1988 with Miguel Branco, to photography, screen printing, and finishing with enamel or drawing. The temporal, gestural layers, the multidirectional movement of reading (like the visitor's body moving through the space of the rooms around the sculptures) echo the movement of Eliot's verses: the reread verses, the rhymes and echoes are transformed into stains and lines; the memory of Art History is seen as a machine materialized in a body. It is therefore not surprising that T. S. Eliot's poem heads the list of readings that Sanches suggests at the end of the booklet. This is one of three lists of suggestions (the others are films, songs, and musical compositions), each with five elements to which one can reduce a creative matrix that is multimodal, made from the infinite intersection of voices, times, and materials.

After presenting works by Priscila Fernandes there in 2025, the Serralves Foundation fulfills its second collaboration with the Municipality of Lagos with this exhibition. This is an opportunity to discover not only the work of Rui Sanches (among the sculptures is the piece Figura 1, from 1991, which began the series of sculpted heads in various formats, voids and fillings that, with wood as the base material, the artist continues to work with), but also the ideas underlying the choice of the collections presented and the organizational rigor of the Foundation (in the curatorship and publication of the aforementioned booklet), as well as the decentralization and expansion of its functions as guardian and exhibitor of contemporary art in Portugal.

This exhibition, coordinated by Carlos Magalhães, is part of the Serralves Collection Touring Exhibition Programme and can be seen at the Lagos Cultural Centre until 4 April 2026.

BIOGRAPHY

Ana Isabel Soares (b. 1970) has a PhD in Literary Theory (Lisbon, 2003), and has been teaching in the Algarve University (Faro, Portugal) since 1996. She was one of the founders of AIM – Portuguese Association of Moving Image Researchers. Her interests are in literature, visual arts, and cinema. She writes, translates, and publishes in Portuguese and international publications. She is a full member of CIAC – Research Centre for Arts and Communication.

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