[open the box] Luís Noronha da Costa

As one can see, Noronha da Costa also made sculpture, besides the films and the painting that have regularly occupied his time.

His sculptures are small constructions that use very simple but greatly effective visual mechanisms, almost always involving mirrors and glass to produce situations that are almost magical in their optical illusions. That is their initial fascination: the mystery of appearing or disappearing, the conjuring trick of the image that is formed or fades away. But it isn’t the only one, because there is a progressive awareness that the visual device is at the service of the evoking of a moment or a typology from the history of art, of a statement on the nature or the falsehood of the images, of a meta-sculpture.

The skull that brings the work its vanitas, the presence of death, projects the refracted reflection of its image onto the sphere, which works as a projecting image of the world and vice-versa: the sphere also surrounds it, placing it inside itself. The image that the dualreflecting glass constructs depends on our relative position, making us go from the narcissistic image of the skull to the funereal image of the moment when its image is projected. As in the mechanisms from the dawn of cinema, light builds the fleeting reality of the image for a particular placing of the spectator. These are ghost stories, of ectoplasms running through the memory of the cinema of Murnau, the anamorphosis in the painting of Hans Holbein, a Gothic imaginary breaking out.

Thus, this sculpture by Noronha da Costa – prefiguring a lot of the painting he would carry out in the seventies – is a powerful and efficient imagining machine, running through us like a dizziness, from the discovery of the effect to the mnemonic that awakes.

One can ask little more from a work of art: for the marvellous to be swiftly struck down by the power of convocation.

Biography
Noronha da Costa was born in Lisbon in 1942. He graduated from the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa, and held his first exhibition in 1962, since then showing his works in several solo and group exhibitions in Portugal and abroad. Of note are his participations at the São Paulo Biennial in 1969, the Venice Biennial in 1970, as well as the retrospectives in 1983 at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and the Centro Cultural de Belém in 2004. His works can be found in several public and private collections, such as the Colecção Berardo (Lisbon), the Fundação Carmona e Costa (Lisbon), the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon) and the Fundação de Serralves (Oporto). He has also worked in the field of writing, and is simultaneously a filmmaker, film lover and film theoretician.

Bibliography
Noronha da Costa (cat.), Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1983.
Noronha da Costa revisitado 1965- -1983 (cat.), Lisboa, Edições ASA/Centro Cultural de Belém, 2003.