An
exhibition in London, at Clearview.ltd
May 20th - May 22nd 2017
« Questioning
the materiality of the screen while filling it up with content – in
general moving images - , the practice of Raphaël Moreira Gonçalves may
revolve around the idea that the world we see is always our own
unknowable creation. Through his sculptures and videos – and their
in-between, the augmented sculptures - , the artist has always been
dealing with the way we create and use images in order to tell our
stories – whether these are personal or collectives. The two videos
screened at the occasion of « And see the land where corals
lie » at clearview are two interesting cases to expand on that
matter.
Bulkyri (2015),
the tale of a mystical hero-painter, could be read as the myth of a
creator of images. If it is difficult to say what the painter generates
as images – he is either covering a rock with black paint or seemingly
trying to write in a cryptic language – his presence on the screen, in
a « real » environment or a « virtual » one, is
always troubling the surface he is appearing on, until he becomes a
screen itself, merging with the ocean. Rouge
Ultra (2015) is also
delving into the gap in between the real and the virtual, the solid and
the void, the living and the deceased, permanentlty renegociating the
relations between them. Recounting the obsession of a young man for
morbid images – an obsession which takes its roots in the death of a
friend he witnessed – the film is questioning the screen both as a
reflector and producer of images, images we then re-project onto the
world through the creation of MORE images.
During his
residency in Tehran (Iran) in April 2017, Raphaël Moreira Gonçalves
developed a whole new body of work – both sculptural and video – which
he talks about as an attempt to materialise the « hors
champ » (out of frame). The sculptures he developed for « And
see the land where corals lie » are a continuation of this
research and become, here, the foreground of his two videos – screened
alternatively -. Hidden creatures from the ocean depths and display
devices staging the unseen, they are blocking the way to the projected
videos while highlighting them – asking : where is the third
dimension ? »
