Pedro Cabrita Reis

Pedro Cabrita ReisLisboa ¶ 1956

 

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

Pedro Cabrita Reis studied at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon and since the early 80s has established himself as a painter and exhibited regularly. Throughout the entire span of his career, Cabrita Reis never abandoned painting, especially if one takes into account the questioning of the geometric abstract painting traditions with which he has engaged and often revisited, in the past recent years, with his immense painting-objects that seem to converge several of the thematic lines of his whole course. He also kept up the practice of drawing, always in a figurative line of work, and with a very special commitment to self-portraits, of which he made several series. However, it is through the sculpture and installation areas of creation that Cabrita Reis would find, in the very early 90s, the path to his full-fledged national consecration and a large international recognition. This became evident through his participation in events such as Metropolis (Berlin, Germany, 1991), Documenta IX (Kassel, Germany, 1992), and the São Paulo (1994) and Venice (1997) biennials. ¶ If at the outset his work was based fundamentally on subjectivity and memory, increasingly it approached formal asceticism and minimalism. From the scenic sensibility of his late 80s work to the clinical rigour of the mid-90s, one can witness a progressive dehumanisation and a poetic and metaphoric dispossession, connected to the contrasting growing affection for architecture-like effects and grand scales. ¶ The Cidades Cegas (Blind Cities) that he began to "build" in the late 90s are not only blind, but silent as well. Resisting metaphorical readings, they elude any pigeonholing in terms of meaning. It is as if the artist has drawn a path from memory to matter. In fact, his work has always shown the physical evidence of the employed materials and construction processes. However, in its first steps, his matter seemed to be matter inhabited by metaphor, if not haunted by it. ¶ Rooting metaphysics deeply into anthropology, it was this very metaphoric condition that bridged the individual to the collective, the arbitrary to the fatidic. The devaluation of the metaphor stood for the preference for insight in the detriment of complexity. If one entered Cabrita Reis's installation created for the 2003 Venice biennial, one would notice the powerful presence of light, which came about as the precise reverse of the driving urges that had guided most of Reis's work until then and were present at other installations, such as Contra a Claridade (Against Clarity, done years before, in 1994, for the CAMJAP).

 

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