7 Olhares e 21 Relicários ou Auto-Retrato como Hipótese [7 Gazes/Perspectives and 21 Reliquaries or SelfPortrait as Hypothesis] is an exhibition by Carlos Marques. In his words diverse gazes, plural thoughts, a look connected in a specific direction. Withhold ideas, formed interiors, read metaphors, recalled expressions. Aggregated visions in a common place, assumed glimpse, expressed quote.
The exhibition presents twenty-one reliquaries and seven gazes, a kind of self-portrait located in the conflict area that one can define as the tangency space, exploring distance situations, of scale, of personal and universal, of similarity and diversity.
After Cascais,
7 Olhares e 21 Relicários
June 4 — October 16 2016
Centro de Memória de Vila do Conde
October 3 2014 — January 11 2015
Fundação D. Luís I, Centro Cultural de Cascais
Carlos Marques is a sculptor, professor and also one of the founders of ESAD Matosinhos. Graduated in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, in which he was a teacher for several years. His work has been presented in almost two hundred group and solo exhibitions, nationally and internationally. Recently he has presented his pieces Uma Janela para Darwin and Espaço de Ensaio para testar Impulos Vários, as part of the exhibition Exuberâncias da Caixa Preta/Comemorações dos 200 Anos de Charles Darwin in the Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis. His art work has been honoured and is part of several public collections (Municipal Chambers of S. João da Madeira, Porto, Matosinhos, Maia, Famalicão, and others), private collections (Bienal de Cerveira, Fundação Couto, Diamond Board, and others), and also museums (British Museum in London, Museu de Amadeu de Sousa Cardoso in Amarante, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, or Casa Museu Teixeira Lopes, Vila Nova de Gaia).
In 2009, apropos of a challenge to develop a piece about a neuron, I realized a work that integrated the exhibition Exuberâncias da Caixa Preta, commemorative of the anniversary and the publication of the book […] The expression of the emotions in man and animals by Charles Darwin. From then on, and as a consequence of that, I started interesting in the exploration of works that had as main reason the study of facial expressions, and this interest got bigger along the year of 2010 when I realized a set of systemized wood embossments with expression of humans and simians that has been grouped and composed into a triptych, Uma Janela para Darwin, presented afterwards in public, in April 2012. […] In the work I had been developing along the years before that, I tried to explore tangency lines that I believe that separate or agglutinate forms, objects, corps or things that, making or not making part of my imaginary, disquiet me; areas of passing by, void places of transition between two fields, places of border and distance, or some structural elements of architectonic construction, without abandoning the references that live in my subconscious, the memory that unconsciously one finds or consciously we elect along the process. […] The actual work comes with these preconditions and the choice of the number seven too, by its duality and the meaning that surrounds it. It is, beyond the magic that evolves it, the spirit of the earth. Conciliates its geometric construction, the spirit-triangle, and the matter - the square. For this exhibition I elected the memory of plastic expressions that, in a way or another, have become a reference to the sculpture that has been always of my interest and I translated it into a tribute and recognition of seven sculptors that have been in direct line with this suppositions. […] The reliquaries are made of coincidences and memories, articulating their valences with the process, cutting, setting up, pasting, building, playing, trying not to lose the memory of the constructions in the childhood, as a ludic throwback to the room of the toys. The memory functioned also as a lever of the process that has been adding forms and ideas, merging them by an osmosis process in repetitive interior constructions, receptacles of memories or latent references, apparently forgotten, showing passages, guessing and hiding spaces in a gathering that is pretended to be almost voyeur, in a unique intimacy of the place destined to the things that one saves. The exhibition presents twenty-one reliquaries and seven gazes of different expression and form as a simulacrum of a unique portrait. A kind of self-portrait located in the conflict area that I define as the tangency space. The exploration of distance situations of scale, of personal and universal, of similarity and diversity is what I intended at least. That is the tangency area, the border space, these memory of two fields or the synthesis of distance that concerns me.
Carlos Marques, Maio 2014