The time greater than time, by Paula Prates and Rita Gaspar Vieira

article

DATE

16 Dec 2025

AUTHOR

José Pardal Pina

The time greater than time, by Paula Prates and Rita Gaspar Vieira

AUTHOR

José Pardal Pina

“[…] If in Gaspar Vieira we see the framework and structure of a life made up of contingencies, in which the work and spatial surveys transcend the solipsism of the creative act, in Prates we see an individual vision of the creative process and the experience of places. Both are valid, and both are complementary.”

It is astonishing how contemporary art has the ability to embrace anachronism, to mix times, to compress them into the same space and capture a temporal memory that is constantly shaped by each person's gaze, by each person's touch. Because contemporary art has turned authorship into fragmentary matter—or, better yet, shared matter—between artist and viewer. There are no boundaries or preconceptions; everything shares in the contamination and perpetual questioning of the issues of art and life, full of chance, accidents, coincidences, and events that always add another trace to whatever it may be. And if any a priori exists, it is that art is a continuous becoming: ever in the making and forever in the making, thanks to the dialogical nexus it establishes with the viewer, the spaces that welcome it, and the works that share with it the winds of time.

This comes to mind with the exhibition The Time greater than time, curated by Ana Anacleto and featuring works by Paula Prates and Rita Gaspar Vieira, whose monumental works reflect this immeasurability of time, or, as we might prefer, the time of art. Both use drawing as a subject of investigation, albeit with very different practices and results.

The cut with the diachrony and synchrony of time, within an atemporality which is in all the matter omnitemporal, is particularly noticeable in Rita Gaspar Vieira's installations and in the situations she created during the opening. Glasses filled with an opalescent mixture of cotton and water expectantly await the entropy of life and the disorderly movement of bodies. Several were spilled by an inadvertent stumble by one spectator or another, pouring the liquid onto the floor, thus demanding a moment of attention for themselves and for what brought us there. Time and evaporation take care of the rest... and, indeed, the trail. The paper film that results from these situations bears witness to a specific day, hour, and moment when art stepped outside itself to become something else—life. The way the works are arranged emphasizes this “movement,” as Jacques Rancière says in Les Voyages de l'art (2023), this “movement,” it was said, “from life to life.” No wonder the works have a gigantic character, since “the end of art,” according to Rancière, “is to shelter life.”

In fact, the floor has been Gaspar Vieira's main work surface, on which she spreads the paper paste, then removes the thin skin left behind by this gesture, thus extracting the design from a surface worn down by time, beaten by passers-by, worn out by the dragging of bodies. This skin is a film of life happening. It is also the survey of a place full of identity, kinetic energy, and vitality. It's interesting to imagine the paper paste and water moving over these planes; to closely observe the shape of a crack covered by paper, dust, color, and the reticulated mesh of ceramic tiles. To see the water and paste flowing through the holes in the building and, in this way, retaining an infrastructure that is as much about construction as it is about human flows, occupations, and work.

There is an unfathomable commitment to matter in these drawings, but there is also a deep understanding both of the architecture of space and the Heraclitean nature of time. Seeing the installations in daylight, allowing the transparency of the pavilion to be an integral part of the work, is an experience that is completely different from that of the night. During the day, the sun's rays penetrate the large windows and fall on these cotton skins: the fineness and delicacy of these films has never been so well exposed. Within this context, Gaspar Vieira clearly offers a reading that comes from the outside during the day. At night, the opposite occurs. The intimacy of the work, the private spaces that the sheets and folds contain, take on another exuberance under the gallery lights and the large glass panel of the pavilion, which adds a glow to the image of looking from outside in. There is, therefore, a clear interest in the interpretation of space and the perceptive experience of it.

In Paula Prates, this understanding is completely different. A dialogue with the viewer exists, but now from a passive point of view. The gestures of the brushstrokes on the paper are traces of a body and a body alone. In this case, the drawing serves as a record of a choreography rehearsed by the artist's body, multiplying itself across various rolls of paper and notebooks. There is, however, a shared interest in space: the performance explores what can only be seen as an exercise that seeks to care for, mend, and heal a space that yields to gravity and shows a series of cracks and fissures in the pavement—marks of its occupation, products of a place deformed by the days. In Prates, there is this very present and very human tension of trying to contain time, only to then let ourselves be carried away by it. At times, time is greater than the time of humanity—it is deep time, which the artist attempts to listen to with triangulations similar to crystallizations, as if time were, in fact, a witness stone, made with all the sediments of an era.

The result is a symmetry in the way of reading time and space: if in Gaspar Vieira we see the framework and structure of a life made up of contingencies, in which the work and spatial surveys transcend the solipsism of the creative act, in Prates we see an individual vision of the creative process and the experience of places. Both are valid, and both are complementary.

The Time Greater Than Time is on display at the Pavilhão Branco of the Galerias Municipais de Lisboa until March 15th, 2026, and is curated by Ana Anacleto.

BIOGRAPHY

José Pardal Pina has been the associate editor of Umbigo since 2018. He has an Integrated Master's in Architecture from Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, and a Post-Graduation in Curatorship from Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Curator of the Dialogues (2018-2024) and Landscapes (2025-) projects in Umbigo.

UMBIGOLAB LINKS

Rita Gaspar Vieira

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