TEXTS

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 

Cristina Massena
Unclosed

January 2020

Nuno Grande

Entre #10, 2019,

Tinta (máquina de escrever) sobre papel,

25x50cm

In Cristina Massena’s artistic work there is a discipline that peeks between an unclosed space: architecture. This is not by chance, as that is her formative root, to where she always seems to return in the moment of drawing, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, living… However, another apprenticeship intersects with the previous: music, expressed in the lined way the artist spills her geometric notes, either by furrowing the paper sheet, or by going through the mirrored plan of the metal.

Goethe once stated: “architecture is petrified music”; in Cristina Massena’s case, music metallizes itself, vibrating with light. Her manual drawings prepare some tones of that musical sheet; her “machinist” drawings – because composed with a typewriting machine – mark the paper, reminding the pianola rolls that activate the hammers over the metallic chords, reproducing the musical play. All this, Cristina Massena pours, in the end, over stainless steel plates, and under the shape of blade or pipe profiles, creating sculptures that are after all gigantic musical scores, or, in another perspective, miniaturized cities.

Yes, it is possible to look at these metallic plans, populated with volumes that repeat and alternate itself, and remind us of the drawings and scale models of so many cities dreamed before by other architects: the Ville Contemporaine of Le Corbusier (1922); the Magnitogorsk plan by Ivan Leonidov (1930); the Broadacre City of Frank Lloyd Wright (1932); or even the No-Stop City proposed by the Archizoom collective (1969). A lot of these urban utopias or dystopias from de 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.

We can imagine ourselves as habitants of these pipes and blades, in the underground or in the piercing emergencies that Cristina Massena patiently soils in the steel metallic surface. In that moment, her sculptures become architectonical models. We can see ourselves, the same way, as reflected narcissus on that steel surface, despite being pierced by its cutting elements. In that moment, her pieces become mirrors of the harms we are all facing in present times.

The unclosed space by the pieces of Cristina Massena lives from that admirable ambiguity: simultaneously musical, architectonic e sculptural, that space is, indeed, a portrait of the way we have been (des)organizing our own urbanity.

December 2020

Bernardo Pinto de Almeida

Cristina Massena (Porto, 1977) is a sculptress that has been affirming herself recently in the new Portuguese art scene, and whose work addresses the, sometimes antithetical, questions between the constitutive materials of the sculptural work and the later forms that it can acquire, transforming its most evident meaning. Her work starts from some reflections previously collected in minimalist poetics, namely the rawness of the naked presence of materials, to now question the way in which form reinscribes matter with another (and new) meaning, namely giving it, suddenly, new communicative possibilities, and even a differentiated presence. A work of enormous elegance and delicate suggestion, hers thus addresses issues immediately linked with tension, in certain cases, and the adequacy, in others, of the way in which the materials get closer, playing among them, and building brief webs of meaning that far transcend the logic of oppositions. Thus, starting from a matrix that was once bound to Donald Judd and Carl André, of letting the materials be freed in the disclosure of their own spatial poetics, closely linked to that typical geometric economy of the minimalist heritage, her work, however, inscribes other possibilities, which are linked not only to the joint use, and without apparent opposition, of various textures (iron, wood, etc.), but also to various forms, usually geometric, to emphasize a kind of abstract form in which the behaviour of materials accentuates a vital aspect. Thus, for example, when the arrival of textured forms of rust, seems to redraw, on the raw nudity of iron, figures that are almost evanescent, but loaded with pictorial memory. It is precisely the way in which we witness this becoming, characteristic of, we could say, natural transformations, like oxidation – the unexpected element that gives its forms a sense of unexpected vitality –, that accuses the possibility of form becoming a space of reception of the metamorphosis and transcendence of what was, before, purely material order, to become almost a sensitive matter.

Between balance and rupture

September 2021

Cristina Massena

The interval that is established between one idea and another is an opening to a possibility. In this interval, apparently contradictory relationships are established, but in the confrontation of extremes the dialogues are amplified. To be in between is to be in the middle, the place where questions are asked. Deconstructing to build. This changes the way of perceiving the world. In this exhibition, two sculptures – setback and counterweight – dialogue with each other and with another twenty-four drawings on paper that rehearse a possible territory through hierarchies, forces, masses, fragments using repetition and a graphic system. The resistance and rigor associated with the metal construction are part of the way the works were conceived and designed. The formal vocabulary is challenged by the natural characteristics inherent to the materials used, such as corrosion, reflection and others. They bring to each passage a poetics that cannot be put into words.