Artworks
Começo [Beginning]
sculpture
Date
2019
Technique
Patinated bronze
Dimensions
34 x 31 x 7 cm
With a career that has consolidated in recent years, Fernão Cruz, born in Lisbon in 1995, is until now the youngest artist to exhibit individually at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, with - Morder o Pó
. Self-referential in nature and with strong elements of playfulness and black humour, Cruz's work reveals a unique oneiric universe through symbols, signs and combinations of enigmatic shapes or impressions of his own body. Between the two- and three-dimensional, the artist operates in a plastic game of physical and visual textures present in the overlapping of patterns and gestures in the practice of a cumulative art, along with a singular mastery of colour and an exquisite plastic treatment of forms.
Through an unprecedented set of paintings and bronze sculptures, of which - Começo
was a part, the exhibition - Morder o Pó
, held in 2016, proposed a reflection on death, absence and fall, simultaneously and paradoxically creating an ode to life and metamorphosis. - Começo
is a bronze sculpture that represents a wall clock, a common and everyday object, but one that has stagnated at a specific time. Using the sculptural technique of lost moulds, the composition of the clock, initially made of cardboard, leaves its corrugated texture and the manual work of cutting and gluing imprinted on the metal. In a contrast between gesture, rigidity and the oxidation of the metal, this work seems to expose a parallelism between linear time, visible through the oxidation of the metal surface, and the psychological and emotional time that is the reason for the clock stopping at that time: the intimacy of the artist's time. Like a kind of ex-voto, this clock seems to mark absence and loss, but also familiarity.
. Self-referential in nature and with strong elements of playfulness and black humour, Cruz's work reveals a unique oneiric universe through symbols, signs and combinations of enigmatic shapes or impressions of his own body. Between the two- and three-dimensional, the artist operates in a plastic game of physical and visual textures present in the overlapping of patterns and gestures in the practice of a cumulative art, along with a singular mastery of colour and an exquisite plastic treatment of forms.
Through an unprecedented set of paintings and bronze sculptures, of which - Começo
was a part, the exhibition - Morder o Pó
, held in 2016, proposed a reflection on death, absence and fall, simultaneously and paradoxically creating an ode to life and metamorphosis. - Começo
is a bronze sculpture that represents a wall clock, a common and everyday object, but one that has stagnated at a specific time. Using the sculptural technique of lost moulds, the composition of the clock, initially made of cardboard, leaves its corrugated texture and the manual work of cutting and gluing imprinted on the metal. In a contrast between gesture, rigidity and the oxidation of the metal, this work seems to expose a parallelism between linear time, visible through the oxidation of the metal surface, and the psychological and emotional time that is the reason for the clock stopping at that time: the intimacy of the artist's time. Like a kind of ex-voto, this clock seems to mark absence and loss, but also familiarity.
