We had the experience but missed the meaning

We had the experience but missed the meaning, solo exhibition at galería silvestre, Madrid, 2018

text by Sérgio Fazenda Rodrigues, curator of the exhibition

“We had the experience but missed the meaning”

T.S.Elliot – The Four Quartets - The Dry Salvages

Luísa Jacinto exhibits a body of work that juxtaposes a series of small paintings (All I want), where the viewer absorbs the image, with a series of large scale paintings, (Inside Out), where the image absorbs the viewer.

The smaller pieces present us with several landscapes and general situations such as walking, pausing, smoking or sleeping. These paintings are worked as fragments of a bigger whole, or as excerpts of something that is elapsing and, drawing closer to a linear time, one foresees the before and after of what an image shows. The painting fixes one instant, but the duration thus built extends itself beyond the visible figure, in an almost cinematographic logic.

We focus part of a sequence, but there is an hypothetical narrative that is left suspended. With no descriptive action, we gaze through the images beyond what they show, only whispering the possibility of a story.

These paintings are inscribed in the center of the support and are potentiated by the emptiness that envelopes them. In this delicate process, the images manage a withdrawal, claim closeness and become our attention’s focus.

The large scale paintings present us passing places. We are before something that intersects the constraint of an interior space with the expansion of an exterior space. If this  side is tendentiously still and geometrized, the other side is predominantly loose and without a layout. Something is manifest before us and, from the background to the surface, edge, place and perception are blurred. Figuration is diluted and our gaze oscillates, in depth, in a movement no longer linear nor horizontal, into a field kept open. Once again, what we see is a section of something larger, our attention is not limited to the outline and drifts across to discover what is beyond.

These works, in their varied dimensions, are linked by an idea of complementarity. Some are small, admittedly figurative, promising another time; others are big, tendentiously abstract, promising another place.

A small image, close to a film still, addresses a penetrating gaze, suggesting its scale laterally, in a sequential logic. A big atmospheric image addresses a drifting glance, in a pendular movement, where extension is given across – passing through. Luísa Jacinto’s works are constituted as transition points, where there’s always more than what’s left to see. These are gradual linking processes, where one inquires an idea of meaning. Not a meaning hiding behind an appearance we might hurriedly judge, but the one that is truly intrinsic to things.