Minha primeira publicação Exposição Negros Claros — Bruno da Cunha | Page 12

CATHARSIS IN THE WORK
RESEARCH ABOUT BEING, POETICS AND THE SACRED
The exhibition of Bruno da Cunha presents a group of pieces that are based on an
elementary investigation into his work. Through the experience of its innermost qualities,
it attempts to materialise the (re)cognition that it makes about questions of a material,
spatial and poetic nature, where concepts such as absence, presence and sacredness are
constant and central features. The works themselves derive from this inner dialogue with
oneself, or the dialogue that begins inside oneself and takes place with the world outside
and is, for this very reason, also part of the poetics of existence, stemming from its intrin-
sic mystery and enigma.
The discovery of this poetry corresponds, so to speak, to the encounter of life with
itself, but in a conscious way that illuminates everything around. And this is an endless
path, for working with this light requires a most careful attention that must necessarily
evolve from within, like a form of practice that, as it becomes more effective, brings us
closer to it, but has difficulty in subduing it, granting us only fleeting moments of cle-
ar vision. For this reason, each of the works displayed at the exhibition, and all of them
together as a whole, are instants of a latent becoming that inaugurates the sharing of a
path which is both already made and being made by the artist, slowly, leading us towards
a place that was already indefinable in advance, but to which he dedicates himself with
great commitment.
We should, therefore, not consider these works to be static elements, but should ins-
tead see them as parts of a silence that imposes itself, a slowness that is peculiar to the
inward-looking nature of the work from which they derive. This static appearance of the
sculptures is achieved by the artist through the materials that he uses and the deviations
that he affords to them, in his fundamental search for the lightness of the material, which
is simultaneously dense and added to the weight of its supports. This lightness exists in
Bruno da Cunha’s work also through the way that it takes into consideration the harmony
that is peculiar to nature (a poetry that is tangential to everything that exists), aware of the
golden proportions and of other internal accords that order the world as it is and as we
are with it. As his work advances, it keeps discovering ever more evidence, and compiling
a better understanding of the way in which things function.
However, such work is only possible within the scope of that attention. The artist
actively explores his capacities for seeing, listening, encompassing, feeling, so that,
with his hands, he can then afford continuity to the work. We say that he continues the
work, instead of commencing it, insofar as the work itself is the space of the research
that the artist proposes to undertake, both from the formal and the conceptual point
of view. As the man conducting the research (into himself), the artist situates the piece in
accordance with the work that he is performing; not in a symbolic sense, as the represen-
tation of something concrete, in keeping with a logic of direct substitution, but through an
integration of the conceptual – of the immaterial – into the material, into the gesture, into
his control of the shape, into the transformations that he imposes on it – or that the work
imposes on him and to which he really does have to surrender – and all these decisions
have as their aim the same attempt of shedding light on something that, in this way, is
manifested through the work.
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