[open the box] Francisco Rocha

I remember entering the Sala do Veado of the Museu de História Natural in Lisbon on the 19th October 1993, where an opening was taking place. It was an exhibition by an artist who would end up having a very fleeting career, as he decided to dedicate himself to other activities.

In the first of the two rooms, where they were launching one of the first independent exhibition spaces in Lisbon, there was a little wall sculpture, a score on a shelf with a drawing and the title of the exhibition. What filled our strangeness, however, was the sound, a sort of mechanical, obsessive croaking that came from the second room and drew us towards it.

In the second room an enormous chandelier made of concentric circles wrapped in transparent plastic was hanging. On each of these wrappings there was a little being, a tiny mechanical animal that moved rhythmically and franticly inside the plastic bag. Protruding from each bag was an electric wire that fed the little animals, originally mechanical fur dogs that had been stripped of their synthetic skins.

The histrionic atmosphere seemed to have emerged from the house of J. F. Sebastian, the character in Blade Runner, the 1982 film by Ridley Scott. The sound of the barking mechanical dogs, the repeated gestures of their paws, the buzzing of their little heads nodding, trapped in their transparent cocoons, produced one of the most remarkable staged surroundings of the art of the early nineties.

Later on Francisco Rocha would make another installation in the same space, extremely beautiful in the brutality of its concrete walls.

This time it was an enormous wall made of cobwebs – the same type as used for cinema props – an organic body that divided up the space. He would repeat the same work with different configurations in the Óbidos Biennial of Drawing and Sculpture, in the same year, and later in the exhibition Identidad/Diversidad at the Circulo de Bellas Artes de Madrid in 1993.

This theatrical condition corresponded to a moment when Portuguese artistic production was finally gaining a big scale and awareness of the value of presence.

Biography
Francisco Rocha was born in Lisbon in 1958. He graduated in Philosophy and had a brief career as a selftaught artist. He was a teacher at the Departamento de Escultura do Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (Lisbon) between 1981 and 1993. He received a grant to study at the Southeastern Massachusetts University (1988). He participated in Identidad/Diversidad, at the Circulo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, 1992) and at the Bienal Internacional de Óbidos – O cerco (Óbidos, 1993), among others.

Bibliography
Identidad/Diversidad (cat.), Madrid/Lisboa, Circulo de Bellas Artes/Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1992.
O cerco: arte contemporânea (cat.), Lisboa, Modus Operandi, 1993.