Observações de uma realidade sincopada [Observations of a syncopated reality]

The exhibition departs from the architectural givens of the Municipal Gallery Pavilhão Branco, which is a building constructed in a garden, whose walls are mostly made of glass. The pavilion resembles an aquarium, inside which a series of movements and actions take place.

Taking the idea of an aquarium as a starting point, Robbio creates an exhibition whose metric is based on a game of scales and points of observation. At one moment the viewer is a Gulliver looking at the Lilliputian cities like a giant at small formations, at another the viewer is himself a Lilliputian submerged in a giant installation. From the micro to the macro, from the distant to the very close, Robbio rehearses a narrative that unfolds through a multiplicity of small elements and creates analogies between interventions that communicate from one space to another, from one work to another.

Each exhibition gallery is a world, an entire universe comprised in that enclosed space. Each room is a topography rehearsed at different scales, with different, almost antagonistic points of view. But if, on the one hand, each room is a world, one could also say that each one is a drawing of a world. The exhibition triggers a relationship (physical, sensitive and conceptual) that the viewer establishes with each map, with each drawing, in the succession between spaces and in the gradations of perspective.

The exhibition presents a syncopated movement of observation of the natural order and tries to contradict, through poetic gestures, the natural order, or at least tries to propose a new order, a new possibility of reading and understanding the language (or languages) of the real. This is a real that starts from the rational, from an (apparently) geometric spirit (of Pascal) and a real that through different experiences, multiple interventions, crossings of rhythms and interceptions of sensations and emotions, builds a common thought and a new structure of understanding of the everyday life.

Enchanting and enigmatic, in a constant illusion of simplicity, Nicolás Robbio’s interventions challenge the viewer not to be a detached observer of art (and nature), but rather to participate in the construction of a new reality and to find new configurations of relationship with forms (natural and constructed). His is an observation that can never be punctual and situated but is rather moving and panoramic. From room to room, from below and above, from inside and outside.

Filipa Oliveira, curator