[open the box] Alberto Carneiro

O canavial is an installation from 1968 that links two other installations in his work that start out from the same principle and which are: Uma floresta para os teus sonhos [A forest for your dreams], 1970, and Um campo depois da colheita para deleite estético dos nossos corpos [A field after harvest for the delight of our bodies], 1973-1976. The three are tellurian situations in which the smell of the land recreated in the exhibition space by the strict and careful organization of elements from the nature cycle produce machines for travelling in time and space towards the spectator. When faced with these sculptures we are transported into a time before and an originating place. The layout of the works, the logs, the haystacks or, in this case, the reeds, obviously follow strict aesthetic and organizational criteria, but the feeling that the spectator gets is that he has dived, through some emotional and affective mechanism of transportation, into a time before the artistic, into a lost time in which aesthetic emotion was linked to primary sensations. For this reason O canavial is an extraordinary work – a passport manipulated by the artist towards something that does not belong to the field of created nature but of creating nature itself, of Natura Naturans, as Spinoza used to state.

Art can try to do very little more than this: to transform its aesthetic organization into fiction that is truly original and, to this end (which for Alberto Carneiro is ecological, as he wrote in the 1968 Manifesto) to involve the spectator – above all because in a reed bed the search is for the absent body, for that body which one day (if ever) might complete ours.

We always have a memory of it, and in it resides our expectation of completeness.

Biography
Alberto Carneiro was born in 1937 in São Mamede do Coronado, Trofa. He studied in the Soares dos Reis (Oporto) and António Arroio (Lisbon) schools. He graduated in Sculpture at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes do Porto (1961-1967), having done a postgraduation at the Saint Martin’s School of Art, in London (1968-1970), with a grant from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. He started by working in the religious art workshops in his home- town (1947-1958). He exhibited for the first time in 1963. He was a teacher at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes and at the Faculdade de Arquitectura do Porto. He was also responsible for the artistic and pedagogical orientation of the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra. His work has been presented in several different institutions, with special note for his solo exhibitions at the Fundação de Serralves (Oporto, 1991), and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela, 2001).

Bibliography
Alberto Carneiro (cat.), Lisboa, Fun- dação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1991.
Alberto Carneiro, raízes, caules, folhas, flores e frutos (cat.), Porto, Galeria Quadrado Azul, 2000.