Mira Técnica

From the cosmogony of images

All work of art has always been a meeting and a revelation

Eduardo Lourenço, Caderno de Apontamentos (Da Pintura, 2017)

In the beginning it was the image as an absolute attempt to project the divine and achieve self-awareness. We know that history, in a broad sense, is defined in the essential relationship between man and technique, as essential elements of nature’s permanent metamorphosis. Spirit and matter are not dissociated in the same way that the sacred word of the Gospels is capable of “incarnating” the whole destiny of human experience. The magical rituals inscribed in Lascaux’s cave dialogue eternally with the tragic figures of Guernica, by Picasso, the invention of cinema fulfills the dream even though it was asleep in an archaic Greek sculpture. Our notion of time is nothing compared to the cyclical evolution of forms. Somehow, the digital already lives in the Prehistory of our condition, in the sensitive interior of the gods that we sculpted in the epic time of the floods. It is this remembrance exercise that the exhibition Mira Técnica, created by Mafalda Santos and Manuel Mesquita, proposes a genealogy of images that invoke painting, video, photography and cinema to rethink our dialectical relationship with the categories of archaic and modern, analog and virtual , the primitive and the technological. The loop of the waiting compass resembles the icon of a sun that both illuminates the movement of images and, in ancient societies, was the object of religious worship and synonymous with life for agrarian communities. See also the screen on which a black and white image runs, memory of the end of television broadcasts or of the photographic negative, transition between the abstract and the figurative to “reveal” to us, like the biblical text, an autonomous immanence only accessible to the virtue of interpretation. Or even the sensation of spatial depth in which images appear and dissolve in their multiple extensions in this hypnotic spiral that allows the eternal circulation of a geometry whose demiurge we know through the redemptive power of the imagination. The same is to say: the vast understanding that this cosmogony of images shows and hides in the shadow of its apparent light.

Joaquim Pedro Marques Pinto, 2017