[open the box] Francisco Tropa

His works are evocations of moments, stories or situations, normally of founding moments or those that possess a unique value – that belong to the extraordinary. Tropa invests enormous effort in preparation and seeks extreme rigour, producing powerful, timeless images that create very allegorical situations that seem to use a forgotten language of form, but which require the spectator to have an endless web of interpretation in order to find a meaning that is always hidden, always beyond what we see. Yet it is never like that: much the opposite, what we see and the smell we feel are the matter of their extremely fine making – which, indeed, is clearly indicated in the Masonic title of these works generically titled A assembleia de Euclides.

Also for this reason, sculpture needs plinths, which remove the objects from contact with the force of gravity, isolating them from the ground, an inevitable destiny of human perishability.

Many of the most present and powerful metaphors on the human condition have to do with the frustrated attempt to escape gravity – like the myth of Icarus – or to the fall as a human destiny – like the idea of the fall of an angel, or the fall into sin.

Being aware of this origin of the sculptural, Francisco Tropa developed a series of works that use the skeleton as a starting point for the sculpture of a body, then to cover the bones with clay, or straw or soil, invoking the first processes of finding the stability of clay through baking it.

The mould (one of the traditional processes of sculpture, like hollowing and linking) is here presented around the object it produces, like the body that covers the skeleton, but with its function being inverted. The showcase is like a casket in which the body-sculpture, the skeleton coated in a fragile and archaic covering, once again meets sculptural and human verticality.

These works obviously do not intend to be replicas of objects of worship. They are cunning operations on the capacity for transfiguration found in the artistic process, which is a machine for converting some things into others, for changing the status and the symbolic of what we are looking at.

Biography
Francisco Tropa (Lisbon, 1968) completed his training at the Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (Ar.Co, Lisbon) in 1992, where, between 1996 and 2007, he was a teacher in the Sculpture Department. He was an Ar.Co grant student at the Royal College of Art (London, 1992) and from the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, at the Kunstakademie Münster (Münster, 1995-1996). He has held solo exhibitions since 1991, with particular note being the exhibition at the Fundação de Serralves (1998), L’Orage, in the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (CAM-FCG, Lisbon, 2003), A marca do seio, Culturgest (Oporto, 2006) and Tesouros submersos do antigo Egipto, Chiado 8 (Lisbon). He participated at the São Paulo Biennial in collaboration with Lourdes Castro (1999), at the Melbourne Biennial (1999), in the Ljubljana Manifesta (2000) and at the Venice Biennial (2003). He received the Amstelveen Prize (1997) and the Drawing Prize from the Caldas da Rainha Biennial (1997). He is represented in several public and private collections, such as that of the Banco Privado Português (Lisbon), CAM-FCG (Lisbon), Fundação de Serralves (Oporto) and Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (Lisbon).

Bibliography
L’Orage (cat.), Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2003.
A assembleia de Euclides (cat.), Lisboa, Culturgest, 2009.