A Vida Longa das Linhas Retas | 20 April - 26 May 2023

The Angolan born Portuguese artist, Pedro Pires, is one of the most singular emerging figures on the international contemporary art scene. With a distinctive inventiveness and a remarkable experimental drive, his process of creation is suggestive of the ancient practice of alchemy. Whether building through the collection, use, and assemblage of objects and materials of all sorts, or performing disruptive actions with fire and brazing torch, Pires focuses on phenomena such as transience, mutation, inscription, emanation and disintegration. Simultaneously composing via controlled parameters and chance, he welcomes the blossoming of the accidental and the contingent into the formal specificity of established frameworks. Working across sculpture, installations, and interventions on paper, he has developed unique ways of shaping the human figure through the transformative representational processes that are at the very core of his oeuvre.

The works on paper, with their distinctive style, feature anthropomorphic forms centred on a bare white or black background. The figures, in dark tones and appearing incomplete, fragmented, or mutilated, emerge from a raft of dynamic, abrasive and destructive actions performed on the paper. The artist guides drops, and projections of metal in fusion over a formally designed surface, a process that results in burn marks, perforations, stains and rays.

These directed yet unpredictable scars trace out penumbral figures, conjuring their enigmatic and uncanny auratic presence, which seems suspended between their advent and dissipation. The representation of human forms through this fortuitous scarification, conveys the idea of the body’s pulverisation, as if exposed to invisible blasts, artillery fire, penetrative storms. The human form is thus paradoxically conjured in the creative aspect of disintegration, made manifest in painful trauma. The works echo forth the mutterings of a dark commentary upon the human genius for war and violence, the forced migration of peoples, and the arbitrary displacement of traditional boundaries.

Most recently, Pedro Pires has produced anthropomorphic sculptures made from plastic canisters widely used throughout Africa for water, cooking oil, and gasoline. Along with the use of this common everyday object, the artist integrates colourful fabrics from the Vlisco and Wax traditions. The textiles are braided in successive knots, forming mantels, hoods, or long dresses covering the heads of his metallic busts and the bodies of his standing human figures. The sculptures are draped from the top of the head to the knee, showing only the lower limbs and the feet. The display brings the mixed ideas of anonymity and hybridisation into the processes of cultural identity definition.

Pedro Pires participated in several group exhibitions including (Im)materiality, at Not A Museum in Lisbon and Águeda Center of Arts (2022-23), the Dakar Biennale in Senegal (2022), Reflect: Fragments, Fragilities, Memories, at the Museum of African Art in Belgrade (2022), Discourses of Decoloniality at Not A Museum, Lisbon (2020), Fucking Globo in Luanda (2020) and Intersections - Within the Global South, at Banco Económico, Luanda (2019-2020). His solo exhibitions include The Practice of Everyday Life at Prior Art Space in Berlin (2022), the Natural History Museum in Luanda (2019), Momo Gallery in Johannesburg (2020), The Green Line, at THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE Gallery, Lisbon (2022), Dualité at Galerie Louisimone Guirandou in Abidjan (2021-2022) and Gardens at the AKAA Art Fair in Paris (2019). In the context of the ongoing project Sculpture in the City in London, Pires was one of the artists selected for the 11th edition with a large format sculpture that is being exhibited in central London (Mitre Square).

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