“The waves pounded the schooner, its bow awash with foam. Doctor Faustus sought refuge from the deluge down below. The hatches on the deck were swept by the thunderous current. Alas, a storm! And it struck by air and by sea with all its torrent. A tragedy […].”
(exhibition booklet, text by João Maria Gusmão, April 2019)
A Pele do Fantasma
The ‘ghost skin’ thus emerges merely as the operation of technological materialisation on clarity, both by means of a project of linguistic and symbolic laceration and through the ‘armed’ operation on a visibly ‘disarmed’ phenomenon via a high-speed camera. The most profound poetic foundations of João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva’s work are to be found in spectral grammar.
– André Poejo, 2019
Lais Pereira
A Sueca
[…] Following the earlier comparison of Gonçalo Pena’s painting with a skin, it is now appropriate to establish how this metaphor is conveyed by contemplating the artist’s ceaseless graphic process. If ‘Sueca’ can still be referred to as a conceptual enunciation of haptic desire, as a game it decidedly denies the aesthetic thresholds of eroticism to reconfigure itself within a rudimentary ludic universe of iconic systems, perhaps the most advantageous form in which to understand this production.
– André Poejo, 2019
Lais Pereira
