[open the box] Pedro Cabrita Reis

The boxes turned into tables that support glass with domes on them are machines, connected by cables. They are, as Joseph Beuys used to say, batteries. In the case of Pedro Cabrita Reis, they are machines powered by an energy that seems to come from a deep, Portuguese and vernacular zone, connected to a memory of some lost time between the vague past and their present.

Pedro Cabrita Reis has that strange capacity to turn us into the activators of a device for moving in time – his works are time machines, vernacular in their fragility. It is in the counterpoising of elements we recognise – devices that belong to an archaeology of memory and the permanent connection to the idea of construction, of edification – that these sculptures find their specific, efficient power.

This work was a commission from the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos and is connected to other works that Cabrita Reis made at the same time, namely as an extraordinary installation that he made for the town of Óbidos. This monumental work was entitled Das mãos dos construtores (1992) and was made up of immense pipelines that led to and came out in sober, enclosed brick dwellings. At the same time he made a set of sculptures entitled H. suits, which added to his work a hospital component which was intimately linked to the body, one that was tragic in the frailty that defined an anthropological view of illness, of perishability and of healing.

In none of these cases is it ever the space as such that his work deals with, but our relationship with it, even when his proposal – in which there is a crossing of romantic memory, the nostalgia of rationalist humanism, the archaeology of a pre-artistic thought and sleight of hand – takes the model of the cathedral or its opposite, the buckle, as its base matrix.

Biography
Pedro Cabrita Reis was born in 1956 in Lisbon, where he lives and works. He graduated in Painting at the Es- cola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa, and has exhibited since the eighties, having been represented in several solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe, the USA, Brazil, Korea and Japan. He began his activity in 1982, at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes in Lisbon, and was present at, among other events, the 9th Kassel Documenta (1992), the Venice Biennial (1995 and 2003) and the São Paulo Biennial (1998). The Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, in Oporto, dedicated an exhibition to him in 1999-2000. He is represented in many Portuguese and foreign collections, among which are: the Fundação de Serralves (Oporto), the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), the Haus der Kunst (Munique), and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid).

Bibliography
Pedro Cabrita Reis (cat.), Lisboa/ Porto/Düsseldorf, Ministério da Cultura/Fundação de Serralves/ Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2003.
Pedro Cabrita Reis. One after another, a few silent steps (cat.), Carré d'Art – Musée d'art contemporain de Nîmes/Museu Colecção Berardo/Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2009