Few artists are born made, whole, complete. Rui Chafes yes. It is a rare case. In 1992, he signed his first exhibitions when the magazine K gave him a terse article title: “This man is a genius.” Chafes was only 26 years. Has 49 now receiving the Pessoa Prize, the most important national prize of consecration, the only distinguishing protagonists from various fields of sciences and humanities.
In 29 editions, is only the second artist contemplated plastic. The first of the last quarter century since 1990 when it was assigned to Menez near the end of life of the painter (1926-1995).
The jury, led by the president of Impresa group, Francisco Pinto Balsemão , integrated economist Álvaro Nascimento, the sociologist Antonio Barreto, the journalist and writer Clara Ferreira Alves, Diogo Lucena administrator, architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, the neurosurgeon John Lobo Antunes, the art historian José Luis Porfirio, the Maria Manuel scientists Mota and Maria de Sousa, former President Mario Soares, the lawyer Miguel Veiga, the CEO of Impresa, Peter Norton, the engineer Rui Magalhães Baiao, musicologist Rui Vieira Nery and philosopher Viriato Soromenho-Marques.
Chafes “achieves the rare feat of producing a work simultaneously without time and your time,” said Friday Francisco Pinto Balsemão at Seteais Palace in Sintra, in announcing the prize, worth 60,000 euros allocated by the weekly Express is sponsored by Caixa Geral de Depósitos. Publico, Chafes responded shortly afterwards: “It’s fortunate to be able to do work over so many years and he have some kind of meaning and generate interest and recognition of a community. I’m not sure deserve it or to have the importance of other people who have received it, but it is a joy and a great responsibility. “
The responsibility, says the sculptor, lies in the fact that when a cross prize as the person is handed over to an artist distinction profiling not only in recognition of an individual route, but pose a greater alert, “a reminder to the art very existence of the world.”
Large part of artistic activity, says Chafes, is intended to feed the market today. “It’s legitimate.” But there are other intentionality of voices, gestures that believe they have “an ethical role in the world.” “Mine is to raise issues, ask questions and get people searching for answers in the sense of the essence of what we call life and existence.”
The good artwork, concludes the sculptor, “always puts issues on the essential “:”. It’s about stripping, go to the core “
There are less than two years told Publico:” I do not care to belong to a brilliant time and colorful remains of an irreparable loss and confusion. I do not want my work part of this vertigo of ignorance and consumerism, this desecration of the world and the miracle of life. It is not of this time alienation: it is to be very informed about the time that fit me live I do not want me hostage him. I think, like the ancients, that there should be a single and higher meaning behind every herb, flower, passing cloud or child is born. For me, art should be the mirror of this intimate relationship, this enchantment, this magic. . I’m sick of horizontal logic that imposes us a resigned look on the routine of the world “
In the work of Chafes, this approach has resulted in an exclusive dedication to iron work – one of the first of its singularities authorial brand.
No, there has never been many artists to work systematically and exclusivity iron. Born with modernist sculpture the essence of that in the second half of the twentieth century, it is more often sought when working with this material: the monumentality, a reflection on the weight and density, the nature and the power of a presence supposedly perennial on its impact both on the landscape, as in humans.
This is not the way of all the American minimalism, the big moment of the use of iron in the contemporary world, but it is the way of the most emblematic of artists working iron today: the American Richard Serra. However, it can be said that Chafes traces a diametrically opposite way to the saw:. Instead of the display of matter, their erasure, instead of the weight, the extreme lightness instead of the density, fluidity
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