Places of departure
The term “whereabouts” carries within itself a certain notion of movement: it designates a place where a person or thing is, will stop or remain. It refers, at the same time, to the point of departure and arrival of something, to an end or to a transitional situation. Such ambiguity and indefiniteness become realized in the series of works selected for this solo exhibition by David Almeida.
The artist focuses on the representation of fragments of space without location or specific geographical landmarks: they do not belong to the urban or the rural space. These fragments operate as non-places.
Despite their material currency, they do not have singularities that make them unique. And as a consequence, they become strangely familiar to everyone. The artworks have a certain narrative about the common: although shared in everyone's mind, these non-places exist only as common places, whose emptiness of meaning becomes realized in, and by, their generality. Accidents, holes and improvised shelters create sort of small landscapes and dilute the viewer’s horizon when in front of the painting.
Like in Teodolitos [Theodolites], a previous series by the artist, the research is oriented towards the apprehension and representation of the space existing between things in the world. In these earlier works intentionally marked objects and crevices suddenly interrupted the landscape. However, in the works shown in this exhibition David Almeida seems to explore the fracture itself, going deeper into a search for the indeterminacy of the spaces and the image references that permeate our geographical imagination. The spaces created, which are always marked by a shadow or a hole, are invariably absences that are also present as painting, like in Ravina [Ravine] and Barrafunda [Deep Sandbank].
In both these works, titled as geographic accidents, the layers of paint seem to behave as subsurface horizons of the ground – often without an abrupt transition within the colour palette. The artist suspends the real scale of the phenomena represented, confusing our references about certain phenomena: in Estivemos aqui em algum lugar no tempo [We have been here somewhere in time] a sort of canyon is reduced to the photographic scale, and its real dimension assumes a secondary character before the concreteness and matter contained in the painting. The fragments of space, however, as they become central objects of the painting, have their condition of non-place suspended.
The dialectic between non-place and place becomes realized in the works shown in the exhibition: there is a specific dynamic proposed by the artist, in which the non-place represented acquires the status of place through the artistic gesture. As a whereabouts, painting is the place of departure and cessation of this dynamic, and in the exhibition, Fissura [Fissure] functions as a kind of index for such an operation. Unlike all the others, this artwork refers directly to an urban fragment and, as an artwork, it operates in the reconstruction of such given spatiality. This operation is realized in a sort of concession of status of place to almost undifferentiated spatial fragments.
Standing before the images evoked and contained in the works, on the limit, the way the painting works allows for the emergence of polysemic narratives upon these non-places. In this way, a possible statement is made about the end of these spatial fragments, in which their own beginning is inscribed: certain facts about the future melt in the improvised shelters – with their almost apocalyptic character – as well as in the ravines, holes and scenes of dug-up earth.
Ana Roman