João Silvério

Project and Escape.      

This exhibition in various chapters by Cristina Massena is, I think, a construction mediated by two of her invocations or inclinations: to meditate on the memory of a place and to feel the thrust of an act or gesture.    

The exhibition’s title, “Fundação – Fuga” [Foundation – Escape], immediately defines an irreversible binomial within the order of its succession in time. Foundation comes from the act of founding, from sources, grounds, thoughts or even architectural foundations, if we wish to broaden our interpretation into an analogy to construction methods, among other possible variations. Escape is movement, action, disruption, escaping among others in a real or imaginary territory. But it can also be associated to the vanishing point [ponto de fuga, in Portuguese] in geometry, or to a leak in a body that causes it to lose its cohesion. It can also be a specific form of musical composition, the “fugue” [a French word for “escape”], that reached its peak during the Baroque period, an epoch the artist admires. 

These brief notes on the title, which is both a theme and a reflection on itself, stem from the notion of escape, which is filled with manifold meanings and senses, memories, phonetic, gestural and sonic inscriptions, as well as many construction materials, methods and forms, all of which are part of the conceptual and poetic essence of this artist (an architecture graduate). This analytical and creative relation is closely connected to an idea of space, and thus to the body, developing a dialectical experience between that body that seeks a founding gesture in the exhibition’s space and the location of memory in the making, which appears to a desire or utopia. While writing about a 2020 exhibition by Cristina Massena, Nuno Grande discusses the often reciprocal relation between the practices and reflections of art and those (sometimes utopian) others that, while belonging to architecture, fins themselves in that correlate of life that occurs in space and time and is located in the house as the archetype of the place for the intimacy of the body within the anonymity of the map of another mundane and complex space: “A lot of these urban utopias or dystopias from the 20th century were lost in the history of architecture, but always resurge, one and another time, in the contemporary art imaginary, as anchoring critical gestures in the present.”1 This relation with a specific house is not obvious in the pieces that make up the series (or chapters), as I previously mentioned. However, what persists throughout is a logic of construction that turns the gallery space into a series of modules that we associate, on the one hand, to architectural elements, and on the other to a geography of memories, affections and relations. In fact, one of the series on display here is titled Relations. For instance, going back to the start of the exhibition, we find a rather large piece that is part of the Path series, a gridded structure (conceived for the gallery’s room/window) that defines a relation between inside and outside, public and private that is the opposite of the exhibition’s final piece, which can be found in the room that directly opposes the window and is titled Escape. This installation, composed of various elements that combine two types of metal profiles, is located inside a closed room and conveys to the viewer an atmosphere of rupture, unfinishedness or even some sort of ruin. In counterpoint to that, and still within this series, we have “Fuga” [Escape/Fugue], a drawing that is evocative of visual poetry, a piece somewhere between collage and assemblage that aggregates music sheets and notes and is part of a sound installation that the artist (who is musically trained) performs with her brother, the conductor and composer Rui Massena. Their collaboration brings us back to the dialogical methodology inscribed in this project: dialogue continuously runs through it. This binomial in my enunciation offers a possible interpretation of two sculptures from the Acceptance series. They are a pair of hands: a closed right hand and another right hand, open e probably ready to give or receive. They are like two individuals, signs of two bodies and two ways of feeling, two memories that seem sculpted by a classical master. Indeed, Cristina Massena’s artistic creation encompasses a variety of production and performance means, materials and what  is essentially a semantic game rooted in her knowledge of ways of creating and making that evoke the memory of construction, in this case as sculpture, and the decorative arts, transformed into unusually rich textures and forms. 

Massena offers us a poetic and sensitive symbiosis that reclaims an emotional, even self-referential aura, while maintaining the austere precision of measure and proportion observable in her various sculptures, close to the human scale. Her reliefs are like fragments from murals or large format monochrome paintings, defined by a frame and a plate of glass that reflects a section of the image, thus engaging with whoever is confronted by them. Another piece, in white-painted metal, is made up of two elements connected by a shaft and evocative of a very spare tridimensional maquette of a house sketch, and a handwritten poem that once again ushers in the word, so present throughout this exhibition. Its first lines can be translated as follows: 

“inner landscapes 

uninhabitable houses 

cages in disguise” 

(…) 

This project is an exhibition in four chapters, or acts, of an escape. Or perhaps a desire, a hesitation to escape, like in Bresson’s film A Man Escaped2. An imaginative vision of her map of references and affections is part of the artist’s research work. 

João Silvério 

Curator