Quando somos 2 somos três. Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações

A few notes on the group exhibition at Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações in Lisbon

Quando somos 2 somos três, Installation view, courtesy the artists and Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações, 2018, photo credits Pedro Guimaraes

Reading the title of the exhibition – Quando somos 2 somos três by artists Sara Bichão and Manon Harrois at Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações – I was immediately immersed in a flow of ideas that somehow reminded me to an aphorism by George Bernard Shaw: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” This aphorism actually stresses, under my personal understanding, the power of the ephemeral that is subtly present in the exhibition although the latter is, paradoxically, full of objects and details. The ephemerality (essentially, what is there but is not visible) is what actually – objectified in absence – bridged all the objects in one work (although the work could be more than just one entity). A work that, on the one hand, lives almost in peaceful harmony and, on the other, feeds on those smooth contradictions that make everything undefinable, like a rhizome where a single story is kindly linked or gently juxtaposed to another just for personal or no reason at all, and that the visitors have to discover and play with. In this sense, as a visitor, I also felt very much engaged.

Quando somos 2 somos três, Installation view, courtesy the artists and Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações, 2018, photo credits Pedro Guimaraes

The exhibition’s layout, a multilayer panel of different timing installed as an open form, functions as a device trigger that the artists conceived not to be controlled on purpose. In fact, it takes only one of the possible shapes, and what is given to be seen is in fact only one of the possibilities that are immanently present in the process of imagining the possible final shape. A shape that implies the capability of the artists to choose where to stop and, on the other hand, by the visitors to intercept their own story.

Sara Bichão, bóia de pesca intervencionada e tecido, 30 × Ø 26 cm, 2018, courtesy the artist and Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações, photo credits Pedro Guimaraes

The expanded borders that the artists ask the visitors to experience are open, to the point that everything seems a never-ending process and a very detailed and well-formalized work at the same time – everything is present in time and space and everything is so far away; everything is heavy and everything is light; everything is a sculpture and everything is a painting, in a continuous dialectic ping-pong with the visitors.

This friction, this fragile but powerful atmosphere, this multiple non-hieratical determination, as well as the gap among all the works present, are thus what allowed the visitors to penetrate into the intimacy of the artists in their long-term conversation.

This exhibition is, finally, an undefinable cosmology, and very much an immersive experience that required time to be absorbed, as it required time to be made.

Manon Harrois, Une belle hauteur, crânio animal, plástico, lã e tinta de água, 30 × 14,5 × 12,5 cm, 2015 ; Sara Bichão, Crânio / Skull, mandíbula animal, algodão, pedra, madeira
e tecido, 26,5 × 19 × 14 cm, 2018; for both courtesy the artists and Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações, photo credits Pedro Guimaraes

Sara Bichão and Manon Harrois. Quando somos 2 somos três. Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações, Lisbon, through November 17, 2018