[open the box] Ricardo Jacinto

The ping-pong table has been transformed into a sculpture because its function has been modified, metamorphosed into a moment of suspended time. The ball is suspended, hesitant between the two fields beneath the shifting of air produced by the fan. It is a mutant entity, between its previous function, which we recognise, and the kinetic quality that the time suspension grants it, the sound of the air and the motor of the fan making a soundtrack that is as neutral as the noise of the air conditioning.

Ricardo Jacinto’s work is a cross between sculpture, sound (because he is also a musician), and architecture (which is his original training), creating devices that are very complex in their conception and often very simple and effective in their presence in space. Over recent years these several fields (sculpture, architecture and sound) have been coming together in the construction of situations that confront the spectator with a riddle, a mystery: one moment we have to decipher a complex game of references and stories, another moment we are confronted with a situation into which we literally dive, our senses taken over by an atmosphere in which sound, sight, space, imbalance, the lack of spatial coordinates, the temperature or touch mark our hypersensorialised relationship with the space.

In these atmospheres the task of interpretation we often exaggeratedly attribute to our relationship with contemporary art is suspended and put into parentheses, because as spectators we are asked to exercise our best capacity for attention and to make ourselves available for the disturbance of senses proposed to us.

Biography
Ricardo Jacinto was born in 1975 in Lisbon, where he lives and works. He studied Sculpture and Visual Arts at the Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (Lisbon), Sound, Music and Video at the School of Visual Arts (New York), Architecture at the Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon) and Music at the Hot Clube de Portugal (Lisbon), an area in which he has had intense activity. He has exhibited since 1999 in Portugal and abroad, with note being: Otras alternativas: nuevas experiencias visuales en Portugal, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (2003), The great gig in the sky, Project Room, Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon, 2004), Del zero al 2005 – perspectivas del arte en Portugal, Fundación Marcelino Botín (Santander, 2005), Caminos, arte contemporáneo portugués, Colección Caixa Geral de Depósitos, adquisiciones 2005/2006, Circulo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, 2006) and Earworm, Culturgest (Lisbon, 2008). He received a grant as a student from the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea, the Instituto Franco-Português and the Association Française pour l’Action Artistique for a residence at the Cité internationale des arts (Paris, 1999), as well as from the Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (Lisbon) and the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento at the School of Visual Arts (New York, 2000), among other supporters. In 2006 (along with Pancho Guedes) he was a part of the official Portuguese representation at the Venice Architecture Biennial.

Bibliography
Caminos, arte contemporáneo portugués, Colección Caixa Geral de Depósitos, adquisiciones 2005/ 2006 (cat.), Madrid/Lisboa, Circulo de Bellas Artes/Culturgest, 2006.
Lisboscópio (cat.), Lisboa, Instituto das Artes, 2006.