dialogue #02

You don’t invite 13 to dinner

A curatorial dialogue

Beatriz Neves Fernandes, Joana Oliveira, Sonia Taborda

“You don’t invite 13 to dinner” is the title of the most recent group exhibition at Dialogue Gallery. This phrase is used as a leitmotif to bring together a diverse set of works using unconventional means to understand reality — including astrology, superstitions, and legends — and perceptual psychological methodologies to establish reciprocal connections between artists and their works. Astrology has been used as a curatorial connection tool, sacrificing much of its esoteric dimension to serve as a procedure to map symbolic interactions, connections, and harmonious or dissonant relations between the various elements of the exhibition and their respective creators. Initially, an effort was made to analyse each element in detail, ensuring that there would be no irreparable tensions in the whole. However, the harmony of the composition sometimes becomes secondary to a preference for dissonance.

Each artist corresponds to a planet or a star, is represented by a sign, and collaborates in constructing a natal chart of the exhibition at the time of its inauguration. The reading of the whole is separated from the individual meanings of its elements, as it depends on various variables, from the viewer’s understanding to the moment of observing the exhibition.

This intuitive freedom allows for an epigrammatic reading of an exhibition that presents itself as a kind of mutating cartography, a perceptual essay inspired by Gestalt Theory and the assumption that psychological phenomena are an autonomous, indivisible, and articulated whole in their configuration, organisation, and internal law. Objects are organised into a global structure that determines the shape, dimension, and function of the parts. Repeating a simple movement, such as passing twelve times beside a table, may only acquire meaning on the thirteenth pass if that’s when the perception and understanding of its cyclicity occur. Here this thirteenth movement ceases to be part of the repetition and opens as a portal to another dimension. Through this revelation, much like when someone breaks a harmful behavioural pattern — the object table transforms into a symbol and personal talisman. Mundane details are transported to the metaphorical plane; myths resonate with our internal struggles and are reflected in relationships with others — with matter.

The exhibition map opens with Glass Ball, a short video by Pedro Huet, that welcomes us to the exhibition space with the rotating movement of circles and the heat of its red colour. In the main gallery, we are introduced to the majestic dog of Horácio Frutuoso The Lord’s Favorite One, which reminds us of the fragility of our human condition. Each in its own time, we manage to stop and discover that, after all, N ã o F i z N a d a [I D i d N o t h i n g] is more  than a comfortable point of information, summarising artist Lulú’s clairvoyance through this Socratic paradox. RVRS, by Manuel Tainha, brings us closer to our origin with the shine of tanned velvet where embroidered glimpses of organic, curved, and round shapes appear, with resemblances between cell, embryo, or even skull. Calabi-yau, by Vasco Futscher, integrates this sequence because it represents  the origin of the universe or multiverse. Inês Raposo serves herself cold in her new work Metamorphoses, a self-portrait that reacts to everyday life in an amorphous way, with the freshness of a head of lettuce. Water Catchment is an ancestral concern; Maja Escher reinvents the tools of this ritual  and transforms them into monuments to the fragility of our planet, establishing a strong relationship between the earth and the sky through their verticality and materiality.

We continue our journey with Alice dos Reis, going through Year Two Hundred and landing in Year Ten, dissemination of light between stellar points. Blowing Bubbles on a Porch, Tom Solty’s most recent painting, extends this notion of space and weightlessness, offering a balcony to observe the thin veneer of an impalpable reality. Aptly, In Questa Finestra [In This Window] is the title of Sara Graça’s ballpoint pen drawing, in which silhouettes of human figures seem blown by the elegance of her loose and unpretentious line. Wind Chime, by Pedro Barateiro, is a simple but imposing ceiling sculpture that establishes a strong relationship between sky and earth. Between its slim vertical organ-like tubes, we can see a small painting of a gargoyle — eternal guardians of time — from Gothic cathedrals. Choke is the title of this new work by Luke Silva, the promising and youngest artist in this exhibition.
The film Each Moment Presents What Happens, the last work of Swedish artist Johanna Billing, reinforces the idea of movement, temporal journey, and the omnipresent condition of the circle in our perception of time, reality, and, ultimately, our existence.

“You don’t invite 13 to dinner” ends its menu with a bright, viscous green crab, which evokes the idea of walking backward, reverse, and restarting. A creation of Lulú — another young and promising artist in this collective — this piece establishes a subtle dialogue with Johanna Billing’s film, one of the most established artists in the exhibition.