L'esprit des lieux


Original text (portuguese)
The broken gear (Luísa Soares de Oliveira)

A pencil draws on its own on a white wall. Well, on its own is only a way of saying it: ther is a connected toy engine, a wire connected to that engine, and the pencil tied to the wire. The engine works, the pencil draws. It draws on the wall.

Or an any other place such as sheet, for example. Pascal Nordmann's installations build very unique studios where then pencils work on their own, incessantly, as if the drawing, which is unique to he artists (and also, the writing unique to the writers) did dot need a body, a spirit to exist. The studio, let us call them this wax, possess everything that is necessary: sheets, tables, chairs (type-writers such as those the writers used in the old days), many pencils, but above all, objects, such as the objects that one keeps without knowing why, which are part of the personal life of shapes, colours, smells and emotions that all of us, either artists or not, keep inside us.

That is why a paper rose becomes Novalis blue rose, says the artist.

That is why it is natural for the artist to assume the house as a projection of his body - after all, the house has always been one of the best achieved metaphors of self identity, as the house is ready for domestic arrangements and decorations settled on taste, on projections and the needs of those that inhabit it. To exemplify this statement, the emigrant house that shelters Centro de Arte de S. Joćo da Madeira, built and divided in the taste of the beginning of the 20th century, is particularly well-adapted to this association. A kitchen, a well-lit studio and to living-rooms that convey meaning to this exhibition - respectively named «Diplomatie de l'ombre» and «La classe mot» - turn the exhibition space into many other functions. Of these, if the two first are evident, the last ones condense the project: diplomacy is made with a pile of old travel suitcases, reminding us of well-known photographs of Jewish remains, and the second presents itself as a school class where the master occupies the place of a possible orchestra conductor. Everything is well when the order, the rule, the law dominate the body.

Another well-known side to this imposition that tames the body with the purpose of subjecting it to the system of wealth production in the western democratic societies is found in the factory; and that association has not escaped to the artist, who, thanks to the support granted to this initiative by the pencil factory Viarco (located, as if by chance, in an industrial building next to that of the Centro de Arte of S. Joćo da Madeira), has filled a corridor of the house with old material of that enterprise, giving it the same connotation that we already found in the remaining rooms used in this installation: the house replaces the body - in this case, the working body - and this body is formed by machines that work, by lights than lit, by compositions that work, though the purpose of that work remains unknown: does it really exist or is everything just an energy expense without end or purpose?

The artist does not answer us. Pascal Nordmann presents us the place of memory on one hand and the place of discipline on the other hand. In the case of this exhibition, discipline crosses a device that assumes four elements: school, domesticity and the artistic work as well as many other versions of social life. However, memory which surpasses all these places is also the source of disorder, of the little stick in the gear that causes de dismantling of the same law.

How do you come out of the law, when you are inevitably in it, since you are born? Pascal Nordmann answers this question calling for the unknown memory of dozens of «Objets trouvés», which inhabit each space with installations of unmeasured scale. The suitcases open, spill their contents on the floor, dolls move, the tea and coffee sets seem to be ready to be placed on the table, the type-writers and calculators wait to be operated on. However, the operator will always be someone absent who has left the raincoat here, the hat there, who has placed the engine that puts the pencil to work, the pencil that draws or writes the sign on the white surface. At any moment, we hope that these type-writers and drawing machines acquire a life of their own, take over the memories of others and launch disorder - because art must be, before all and since its beginning, disorder - the chaos, in which the visitor moves.

It is only this way that the house will truly become body. Only this way will the visitor, always an intruder and voyeur of someone else´s intimacy, be able to enjoy the exhibition fully.
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