Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Pedro Cabrita Reis
Portuguese; 20th-century, 21st-century
Antwerp, Belgium: Middelheim Museum
64%
The Passage of the Hours. 2004. Glass, aluminum, brick, iron, cement, fluorescent lamps
The piece, which looks like a bombed-out apartment building, is a deceptively complex system of building's-structural-components-as-empty-frames. It fosters a continuous confusion of insides and outsides. An I-beam, for instance, will appear to be delimiting the border of some negative space, but then you'll realize that it itself is being delimited by a fluorescent bulb on its own outside, which then makes the erstwhile outside into an inside (and so on, and so on). This visual-semantic mechanism is traceable to Cubism and, before that, to Cézanne. It is stimulating, but without the aesthetic authority afforded by a grounding in the tradition of a medium (which Cézanne and the Cubists undoubtedly had) it runs the risk of becoming circular and inartistic. Reis's patent disregard for architectural authority — this is literally an anti-building — gains him some shock-points, but it holds his undeniably "interesting" visual effects from legitimating themselves artistically. (TFS, 2026)