DAVID BARRO
If there is one thing that seduces us about Sandra Baía's works, it is how in many occasions Baía manages to appeal to all senses at the same time. Her mastery of scale, her sense of orientation and balance, her relationship with the context that hosts the work, the search for the displacement of the viewer and the dimension of time, the careful lighting, her visual deceptions from the plastic, the involvement of sound or the eloquence of her silences and how the artist is able to merge perception with memory and imagination, allow each of her exhibitions to be an atmospheric experience that needs little more intellectual induction than our own emotional sensitivity. Sandra Baía has managed in the last years to provide with her works what Constantin Brancusi associated to the impact of life: the feeling of breathing. In other words, she manages to imagine situations and spaces, objects or paintings, capable of evoking an imaginative reality similar to a real experience.
In the exhibition Wild Urbanity, at Galeria Filomena Soares, the artist introduces us into an archaeological and urbanistic fiction, connecting us to the architecture of the exhibition space, but also to the architecture and urban landscape in general, with its memory, when it becomes an enigma of what was and assumes a specular condition, between what is revealed and what is hidden. This idea of the vestige, of the performative remainder, so present throughout the artist's career, is always associated with the unknown and apparently insignificant, as in the case of her recycled objects, apprehending her anonymous past, what Boltanski called "small history", referring to the past that remains hidden, the ruins or discoveries of what dwells in the background. Sandra Baía's works assume these frictions or marks of the past as part of the process; reality blurs when the other reality - the pictorial - emerges and consolidates, although it never disappears, it is only transformed.
In the first room, the artist presents Fragments on a hall, an intense and monumental work that at the same time manages to project absolute serenity and intimacy. Sandra Baía is inspired by the large containers that dominate the ports of big cities until they become small cities in themselves, but also by the buildings that are demolished and of which we only see their empty walls, almost always with different colours that both inscribe and hide past histories with which we are only allowed to speculate. Both cases have been used as motifs by other artists, but the uniqueness of Sandra Baía lies in her way of working with the material and in the way she achieves an ambiguity of meaning between what remains hidden and what is revealed. The space unfolds like a letter, always situated in uncertain territory, between the addressee and the sender, in this case between the artist and the spectator. Lacan said on the Seminar The Purloined Letter that what is hidden is never anything other than what is missing in its place, and in fact, facing what is hidden we project a different form of intensity, giving strength to this state of bracketing. Sandra Baía dives into this game and moves one of the works that make up the work, in an infinite game of hiding and unhiding, encouraging our physical displacement to accompany our mental displacement, situating once again her work at the intersection between painting, sculpture and architecture, tightening the plastic possibilities of the place to always be close to the quotidian.
It is in this way that the artist sensitises the viewer to architecture as a starting point. Because hers is a spatial sculpture, capable of assuming the verticality of the walls or the horizontality of the floor as part of her work, as we can see in Hall-in-one or in Interstellar collision, two works on display that function in a kind of horizontal abyss. For the spectator there is no place for certainties. If on many occasions his work has been transmissible, on this occasion this transitivity is based on reflections and sounds, which interfere and expand the space. The interesting thing is that everything takes place in a field infinitely larger than that delimited by the surface of the work, which is already, in itself, very large. But the proposed game is much wider, something like a resonance of the lived experience, hence the importance of sound, which involves us and transports us to a place without a place, like its mirrored surfaces.
While with Fragments on a hall Sandra Baía manages to underline a kind of inner displacement in an almost imperceptible way, softening the painted surface, transporting us to a world in a trance of fading and crumbling. The chromatic fields generate an effect of infinity and the voids and ellipses, the silences, like the one in the missing piece, take on an atmospheric eloquence.
Borges stated with special lucidity: every place is archaeological. Sandra Baía knows this and works these sediments, so that the spectator completes the ellipses that are born among the fragments of those who preceded us by inhabiting these images or objects. The texture of the city is achieved here with a series of paintings made with stainless steel and electromagnetic paint with a flocking effect.
For those who have not yet become familiar with Sandra Baía's work, it is worth noting that her works always obey an interest in building her work from the context that hosts it. In other words, she almost always ends up converting the context - the exhibition space - into content, since her works end up conditioning the exhibition space itself and its initial circumstances. This is a premise that precedes the work. In other cases, such as in the mirrors or inflatable balloons, it is the space that reverberates and the relationship between the works and the space that hosts them becomes indissoluble. In these, the intention is not to propose a reflection to the spectator, but rather to modify his perception, to establish fissures, deformations like those intended by Francis Bacon, who, by placing glass in his paintings, suspends time in the experience of the uncertain.
On other occasions I have underlined Sandra Baía's capacity to work with visual textures, the tensions between lines. Because in her work there is always a certain interstitial tension, typical of the looks that seek the margin, the limits. That is why the intention of her mirrored surfaces is to interrupt the spatial vision allowing the contraction and expansion of the space itself. It is as if our gaze were exposed to a horizontal abyss. Our gaze is lost in a space that stretches and deforms, and when the mirrors or aluminium surfaces are painted over, the mystery is hidden.
I like to insist that Sandra Baía is one of those artists capable of moving fluidly between the illusionist space of painting and the physical presence of sculpture, between the measured and concentrated of the small scale and the expanded and impenetrable of the monumental scale. Wild Urbanity is a good example of this. The equation is not within the reach of many creators, because her work is situated at the crossroads, where the tension remains hidden. Sandra Baía creates landscapes within landscapes. This is how she perverts our vision, how she destabilises our memory to generate fissures in perception by placing us in a space capable of generating its own resonances, or its own collisions. Here, as Merleau-Ponty points out in many cases, it is not a matter of seeing the work of art, but of being able to see the world through the work of art.
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JOÃO SILVÉRIO
Density and utopia
Let us start by looking at the works’ titles: Wild Urbanity, Fragments on a hall, Hall-in-one, Mutual excitement and Interstellar collision. In all of them we sense a sort of duality, like a transition between a concept of construction, and thus material in nature, and a reality that is sensitive, permeable and sometimes sensuous. The artist’s manner of naming and identifying her sculptural pieces contributes to that dualism, or else to a dialectic between the artwork and the context it will activate, which, right from the start, turns the viewer’s space into an arena of confrontation and interaction. However, this feature, though quite significant within the artist’s work, may sometimes become less visible when a quick glance at the piece’s title is confronted with the wide range of materials Sandra Baía explores in her works. A particularly telling instance of the sculptural treatment given to that semantic tool that gives meaning to our relationship with the universe of material objects and, correlatively, with a concept of ambiance that expands itself over nature both as we know it and under the transformation it undergoes can be found in a 2018 work, “Entalada” [Wedged]. It is a reflective sphere of considerable size, larger than the scale of the artist’s body, which was displayed in a variety of contexts: first in Lisbon, literally wedged between two buildings, as part of Projecto Travessa da Ermida, and later under other names, in urban environments or historical monuments, such as the Carmo Convent, and more recently within a wood, in the context of Finger Print, an exhibition held at Fundación Manolo Paz, Spain.
For the present exhibition, Sandra Baía looked at the gallery’s space as a means to organise the show, conceptualizing its set-up within the framework of a relationship between the body’s limits and an artwork that reconfigures architecture. Fittingly, she offers us a sensorial experience that enters the collective imagination and draws a fictional, cinematographic dimension from it. The exhibition highlights an ambience that develops across two acts and is rooted in a construction of elements that present themselves as organs from a fabricated and fragmented urban body, made up of industrial materials that modulate a number of forms and volumes that appear to emerge from the depths of a precarious apocalyptic memory.
Consequently, when we read the title of one of the pieces, Fragments on a hall, we find it almost impossible not to connect it with the exhibition’s title: Wild Urbanity. This work is the protagonist in one of the two moments or acts that construct the exhibition. It is indeed a construction, but solely in the metaphorical sense, since each and every reference to constructed urban space is simply probable. This probability is also present in a certain dimension that the sculptures draw from the megalopolises and their buildings, possessed by a dubious humanity.
The piece is organised into modules, which fit together via an element that intersects the module contiguous to it, like an infinitely replicable connecting link. In other words, this impressively sized work is, in the end, and in itself, a fragment of a possible larger reality, of a fictional nature and akin to a universe of images that run through literature and film, in the visionary and still Utopian wake of Blade Runner and other sagas possessed by the tragic splendour of constructions that aggregate everything and are associated with the depredation of nature, of which only a memory seems to remain. This work, and these modules, which put us in mind of the unity and totality their overall form suggests, can inspire some questions: are these walls all that is left? Are they paintings that remind us of ruins of industrial or domestic rooms? And, if that is indeed a ruin, how can such remains be so chromatically beautiful, so sensuous to the touch and to the feeling of desire, in the material features of their painting? And what are the materials of that painting?
One further question appears pertinent: this piece’s title conveys the notion of a route, like fragments on a wall or passageway (?). That route demands, on the one hand, that the viewer move along the work’s longest dimension, and on the other that they distance themselves, in order to grasp it in its totality. However, the gallery wall asks us another question, in the form of the empty space that appears to create a gap in the composition. That element, which seemingly interrupts the work’s regular form, occupies a different place, a room that appears to be not a part of the gallery’s exhibition area, generating the impression of an urban geography, of familiar elements disseminating across the space.
In the gallery’s second room, the artist redesigns the whole space by means of a hanging sculpture that compresses the room in all its dimensions. The previously mentioned concept of ambience is here a black, sound-emitting physical presence, like an architecture that bursts out of the pre-existent architecture. Though seemingly motionless, it also gives the impression of moving, like an entity that breathes in the sound that envelops us and appears to do justice to its title: Interstellar collision. This work develops out of the contradiction between the tension in our bodies and the delight of the viewer’s eye as it glides over its surface, viewing it as an elliptical, perhaps even cosmic shape, when in fact it is a sort of calotte, designed as a perfect circle. References to apocalyptic and fictional cinematography seem more evident now, intensifying the poetic dimension in Sandra Baía’s work.
However, I find that her creations are generally focused on subjects that question our relationship, as sensitive bodies, with the space through which we move. It is a body of work that engages with modernity, exploring the limits of sculpture and architecture in a close relationship with gravity via suspended columns and reflecting surfaces, as in Hall-in-one, a work that, though laid on the floor, appears to actually float by distortedly mirroring the context that surrounds it, inevitably generating tension with the verticality of the human body, in front of the wall. Even when large works are installed on the floor, their base is the same plane any one of us walks on, not a pedestal or plinth. In this respect, her work is part of a line of artists who explore the space and the movement of the body through sculpture and its relationship with the body, as Richard Serra states while talking with Hal Foster about one of the most important ruptures in the history of 20th-century sculpture and art, namely the relinquishing of the elevated base, an implement that serves monumental memory, in order to reactivate the viewer’s space in the various modalities of their behaviour, now on the same level as the sculpture. And that is precisely what happens in the experience of this exhibition, between the haptic density of sensuous, vertiginous colour and the transformation the space undergoes in the presence of the sculpture, independently (or not?) of its sometimes “wild” density.
*Revision and translation by José Gabriel Flores