Quando se pergunta pelo sentido do espaço ou o espaço como obra de arte: um guia para viajantes

Abstract

The present work consists of a reflection, arising out of artistic practice, on the relationships between space and the work of art, such as pure indissociability. The starting point reveals itself through the significant changes occurring over an anachronic history of space, unveiling some subtle principles where space is withdrawn from a purely physical environment and subjected to a much more wide-ranging confrontation, starting from the polysemy that the concept embraces. In this sense, space does not delimit the boundaries, closing and receiving an object, it goes far beyond this. When the artistic languages apprehend space as a fulcral agent, all spatial dimensions are modified. If, on the one hand, we perceive the work of art starting from the receptacle where space contains it, on the other, we would notice from then on, the indistinct contours and the boundaries, instead of looking only at the centre where the artistic object appears. The work in question becomes an exercise, creating question marks between the spatial void and the corporeity of the work. The investigation brings to light the complexity of space as a symbolic representation and the need to consider speculation appropriate tothe problems related to space in contemporary artistic practices, where its meaning is built up as a configurative element in the plasticity of the work. The text was conceived proposing an artistic experiment as an investigative practice, in the form of a reflexive narrative of a traveller, where we point out crucial points for development, both in the form of its graphical representation, as in the manner of exposition of its textual content. We seek to articulate modes of knowing, trying not to cloister the object of the investigation in an exclusive system, but, approximating artistic practice to the exercise of writing, allowing connections to blossom to the point where the artist in a double sense can give form to a content.