Minha primeira publicação Exposição Negros Claros — Bruno da Cunha | Page 13

In Bruno da Cunha’s work, this immaterial dimension, resulting from his poetic research
and appearing though the sculpture itself, is, in a certain sense, sacred. It is something
very close to the image of a source somewhere that feeds and animates the world and
that also orders it. Something close to the essence of nature in its totality. The ways in
which the pieces draw closer to these inner dimensions of things are manifested through
their various material dimensions and their scales. On the one hand, through the thick
blackness of the rubber against the light wood, whose chromatic and tactile contrasts
heighten the experience of discovery, but also through the gesture of its making, the in-
tention to elaborate, to realise the work as the sum of its (re)cognition, as the presentation
of something and also – perhaps even above all – as the investigation into the limits of
the colour and the material in their relationships with one another: addition and support,
space and time, world and order, earthly and sacred, and into the possible shifts taking
place within these relationships. On the other hand, through the game of the different pla-
nes, also black, folding and unfolding in varying rhythms, where each vision determines a
unique, precise break, while, at the same time, to some extent leaving the lines that mark
the beginning and end of each piece still ill-defined. Because it is also this that is being
questioned: the amplification of the senses, the meaning, and the limits. Transposing,
transgressing, opening things up through the material are, in short, the formal inten-
tions considered most essential to this artist’s work. Yet another dimension – decisive
for the relationship that we establish with the pieces, and also of substantial importance
for understanding the exhibition and Cunha’s artistic project – is the inference that they
exert upon the space and which shapes the experience we have of this. The size of the
sculptures and of the sculpture-paintings has a direct relationship with the public space,
since they have been produced according to an exterior scale, which, on being transpor-
ted into the exhibition space, necessarily provokes decisive alterations there – besides
the blackness, of course, as a mass and a presence that imposes itself and accentuates
these alterations, even if these are based on that elementary lightness which, through the
artist’s own efforts, necessarily characterises what he does. Through this imposition, we
form a relationship with the works that goes beyond the limits of mere contemplation and
seemingly thrusts us into the inside of a larger work, into a space between the works. We
are, in effect, pushed into that sphere of time, and of attention; we are invited to listen, to
encompass, to feel, to see the deviations, other rules, other limits.
Even though the enigma of the silence (which is also the enigma of the sacred and
the poetic, and of the deviations and the renewed laws) that certainly sweeps across the
whole of the exhibition space, through the works themselves, can cause us to feel the
sensation of an imminent void, it is the sensuality and elegance of Bruno da Cunha’s work
that we notice, in this painstaking catharsis to which he continuously devotes himself,
both of which reduce the works to the minimum gesture, using such simple materials as
wood, rubber or aluminium, whose particular physical characteristics afford each piece its
own artistic curiosity. And I believe that it is in this way that we so easily create an affinity
with the works; we are even, in a certain way, impelled towards them. Although we may
find this somewhat strange, there is within us a certain attraction to the depths, a natural
curiosity for mystery. And the catharsis of this mystery, which he himself investigates, is
perhaps the most essential manifestation of the artist’s work.
by Maria Joana Vilela