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Exhibitions
- Mauro Cerqueira
Dripping wax
18/11/2017 - 28/12/2017
The work of Mauro Cerqueira has always been closely tied to the sociological context out of which it has evolved. Living in recent years in one of the oldest and most iconic streets of the city of Porto, his art has developed in an ongoing connection with the vicissitudes of his neighbourhood and surroundings. It is as such, and through swaps and exchanges, that the form his works took, tending to be oriented towards installations and sculpture, would take inspiration in found objects, personal stories, neighbours and the popular iconography of the original history of the city itself and the street where he did most of his work.
Porto has undergone a ferocious process of gentrification which has transformed the city, along with its most deprived districts and neighbourhoods – precisely those in which Cerqueira worked – into new bourgeois leisure areas from which all the locals remaining in the buildings – or dilapidated ruins which many had become – have been violently evicted. As such, the conceptual and sociological sources, everyday dealings with the original neighbours, and even the aesthetic aspect from which these questions were originated, the use at times chance and at others conscious of objects exchanged with other locals, have been drastically and forcibly removed from the horizon of Cerqueira’s visual
imagery.
For his third exhibition at the Galería Heinrich Ehrhardt, the artist has replaced his most well-known references with a more subjective universe. Context is replaced by the individual. This is a much more introspective proposal, where, due to his influences and his working methods, the works come into closer and denser proximity with the questions related to the subject.
The idea of the mirror and the appearance of the subject and its reflection now flows through each one of the pieces on display. The exhibition is made up of works belonging to his latest series. On the one had those executed with molten wax on the surfaces of mirrors, and on the other hand canvas paintings.
The mirrors and the wax take shape both as modular floor sculptures and as wall pieces which act as paintings. The process of the wax melting, at times enhanced by diverse pigments, the gradual coverage of the surface, drop by drop, the light of the candles he uses as working tools and the mirrors, arranged horizontally throughout this procedure, construct a reflexive and pseudo-spiritual scenario which lends the works a dramatism not previously witnessed in his earlier production. These art works also constitute a genuine point of contrast with the canvases, the ferocity and immediacy of which is reminiscent of his early artistic works, at a moment at which punk, performance art, wild scrawls, slapdash painting, fanzines and counter-culture contributed to forming his ideology.
Without being a psychoanalytic proposal, the use of the mirror, the appearance of the notion of self and the subject, and, at the same time, the vision of the viewers themselves, reflected in the works through the areas stripped off the waxy coating which reveal the mirror underneath, builds up a perception of the image which goes beyond mere aesthetic construction, without losing sight of the work itself. The work of Mauro Cerqueira has always been like this, committed as he is to a sociological, political and historic reading, without abandoning the poetic and aesthetic virtue which now invigorates the intrinsic beauty of his new works.