Pedro Cabrita Reis

Volume!, Rome
Through June 30

A maze created from partially destroyed, high, brick walls is lit up by a few neon lights covered with aluminum. The detritus on the floor crunches under the visitors’ footsteps, breaking the silence and the absolute stasis of the environment, which is immersed in a dim light, as disturbing as it is enigmatic.

The title of the installation, D’après Piranesi refers to Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the creator of the extraordinary etching cycle Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons, 1760). This not only topographically defines the proximity of Cabrita Reis’ elaborate space with the Roman jail, the Regina Coeli, but also reveals the inspiration for the theatrical sense of the sublime which pervades the installation. With a piece such as this, the Portuguese artist continues his inquiry into the creation of architectural spaces that are strongly bound to a specific place by means of a total setting.

The work plays on an explicit duality: on the one hand there is the form itself—the brick walls erected by builders following the precise blueprint of the artist—which maintain their material and concrete value, thus facilitating a reading based on plastic and figurative criteria; on the other hand, there exists an aspect which is immaterial, poetic, and spiritual—the intervention of the artist who destroys the walls—which emphasizes a general relation to space that evokes mythological and anthropological elements.

Cabrita Reis, like Joseph Beuys, considers the work of art to be a magical-ritual action, and the artist a prophet, enchanter, and shaman, capable of healing the world with collective performances of animistic ancestry. Within this aesthetic view of symbolist derivation, the meaning of his work becomes clear.

An architectonic, archetypical object—the wall (a house, a prison, an ancient monument?)—is built and then irrationally destroyed (by mythological time, war, negligence in urban suburbs?). This act creates another primary element, both rational and irrational—the maze (the city, the Tower of Babel, memory?)—that is the probable metaphor incarnate of human behavior and of the contradictions associated to the development of civilization.




Marcello Smartelli
Translation by Amanda Coulson