painting, between thought and perception

Carlos Mensil’s current exhibition at Galeria Presença, can be perceived as a flow of images-in-motion, forces that shift between a “thought-painting” and a “upcoming-painting”.

Painting is a force that is also a presence, a body that moves, first and foremost, it is a “thing” (a body) and because it is “something” that can be thought of (by another body).

In this exhibition we can observe 14 recent artworks (created between 2017 and 2018) which mostly explore the possibilities of stainless steel as a performative material: a video/animation being played alongside a sound and two pieces with engines, magnets and steel spheres. But, nonetheless, there, as a counterpart, an invisible dimension: the sound is not coinciding with the action, the objects that move without an apparent reason, the light and reflection of the plastic that involves some of the framing structures.  

Carlos Mensil is not interested in naming the painting, rather to create a space to reflect about painting as a type of language and happening. Essentially, the whole exhibition takes place in a fraction of time, in a hiatus (of time, of space), in some kind of void. Everything is presented as a negative: the image appears as an analogy, and the object as a magnetic force which moves according to its own free will.

We are not far from an animistic pulsion, which very much defines the very own act of painting: things that come to life, escaping the control, the hand of the artist himself. In fact, in the material or substantial sense of the word, we can hardly see a thing (the artist works in reduction); yet, we see, but in the physiological or phenomenological sense: we see a body of proposals operating (in expansion) in the space of the invisible, that hiatus between appearing and disappearing.

Or, using the artist’s own words, “what can be interpreted is not dead”. Though painting is, paradoxically and by definition, a reflection on the unavoidable and imperceptible nature of time which leads us to that unknown “place” which we have agreed upon to call death.

Nuno Faria