Pedro Tudela & Sério Fernandes
Kubikgallery, Lisboa

AS MATÉRIAS TEMPORAIS
TEMPORAL MATTERS

In a time marked by ideological polarization, the intensification of cultural wars and the uninterrupted flow of strong images that animate the current digital economy (and media competition in the art world), in this exhibition we glimpse the horizon of a gravity anchored in the concise forms of a rigorous workshop in the face of the labyrinths of creation, in the slowness of the imperceptible engendering of subjectivities and of a certain benevolence, against the backdrop of a silence that carries the violence of centuries and the silent pain. A kind of landscape indifference – indistinctly archaic and urban – that we can describe as existential, ascetic or bearing a spiritual yearning, but invariably participatory in an enlightened dialogue with technical culture and the history of disciplines.
In this exhibition, the two artists establish a fraternal dialogue that brings together painting, drawing on paper, photography, video and sculptural objects, also calling upon materials such as cast metal, blown glass and sound. The approximation of the two works allows for the mutual illumination of their respective repertoires from renewed and surprising perspectives. The organic or vegetal motifs in Sérgio Fernandes’ large-format canvases, for example, recall some of Pedro Tudela’s early painting, from the mid-1980s, marked by a vocabulary overloaded with a (not without irony) baroque sensualism; while the sound research in this author (even if expressed in sculptural form, such as the five hollow brass branches that evoke the pentagram of musical notation) elucidates the timbral dimension of the games of chromatic perception (the atmospheres, the textures, the notes of color, the “inner light” that the shine of the oil glazes sometimes offers) in the full range of sensitive reverberations in Sérgio Fernandes’ painting.
In both artists we recognize the circumspection of the calculated balance between the structure and the control of form (the presence of geometry, symmetry, the cross, seriality, the grid) on the one hand; coinciding, on the other hand, with the free gesture of hospitality in relation to the unforeseen behavior of the elements, to physical events and to the corruption of materials by the passage of time. These qualities are evident in ‘Tempo (2024)’, a set of beach safety flags consumed by the sun and wind, aligned by Pedro Tudela in a frieze or in the static energy of the vinyl records that the artist makes us listen to (including the dust, scratches, and contingencies of the support), making the sonority of the medium visible and materializing the device of phonographic inscription; as in Sérgio Fernandes, the practice of painting with the canvas laid out on the floor, invested all around, renouncing brushes, trowels, or spatulas but distributing the paint directly with the hand, guiding it through successive inclinations, managing the cumulus by the weight of the paint on the cotton weave, the impasto, the pockets, the roughness due to the oxidation of the oil, and the drips, producing a material painting with a great expressive effect in the sedimentation of the marks of the process. In Pedro Tudela (in addition to the wear and tear of the flags, the various pieces of cast metal retain traces of the joints in the formwork and the waterfall that connects the cane to the purpose is maintained in the six blown glass bells that make up the gamelan) as in Sérgio Fernandes (in the successive layers, accumulations and accidents), the form seems to safeguard the ways of making. The fresh or coagulated blood in Sérgio Fernandes' painting and the coldness of the metal or the black shine in Pedro Tudela mark the razor's edge between life and death, drawing attention to the transitivity, the transience, the instability of the precarious condition of things on the face of the earth and the vital need for care and healing. Hence, Tudela summons the unrepeatable physiognomy of small branches, sharp stones and a staff (painted and turned into a flagless mast) found in wanderings in the natural landscape but associated with metal rudiments and perforations appropriate to instruments of maritime life, nautical life or construction; while Fernandes discusses the incontinence of matter, the overflowing liquidity of natural elements, the derivative power of images. As if we were discovering, underground, an arborescent, rhizomatic or diluent logic common to both works that points out in a single gesture the devastation and the fecundity, the uninhabited territory and the animal drives, the mass and the ineffable of meteorological modeling. Hence, the title of this exhibition, Yepsen, added of an s (phonetically suggesting “sense”, “sense” or “senses”) alluding to the term in medieval English relating to the unit of measurement of volume drawn by the concave space of hands joined together in the shape of a shell, the unstable and temporary container capable of enclosing an element that inevitably disappears between the fingers. Just as the impermanence of the light from two crossed tubular lamps in intermittent start-up creates, in TIALTNGO (the initials of There is a light that never goes out, a song by The Smiths sculpted here to the point of unrecognizability) the mournful and sparkling image of a nocturnal storm.
The chromatic vibration (under the influence of Mark Rothko) in Sérgio Fernandes's paintings, like the tonal composition, the cadence, the intervallic rhythm between the glass bells in a waveform in Pedro Tudela (in the footsteps of Paul Klee), suggest schemes and chains of transmutation typical of an alchemy compendium in a work in black. The constant allusion to sequences of affluence and transubstantiation (the declinations of oil in textures or nebulae in Fernandes and the metasound in Tudela) remind us that the aesthetic experience is elaborated precisely in the movement of circulation between the states of matter, in the variation of moment and duration. In the face of the ineluctable finitude of the earthly condition of all present things. And perhaps – as we probe in the work of the two artists united in the same consciousness of escape – among the temporal materials, only those bodies traversed by the imperfect tremor of poiesis resonate, where the shortcuts of thinking, manual work and feeling in time coincide like the exact touch of the tinkle of gold.

Text: João Sousa Cardoso
Photos: ©Francisco Zenha Preto
Photos: 10, 11, 12: ©Pedro Tudela