Tiago Baptista
Behind thought

Exhibition view (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Exhibition view (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Cruzamento, 2017, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Cruzamento, 2017, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Untitled, 2017, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Untitled, 2017, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Exhibition view (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Exhibition view (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Ctesiphon, New York and the moorhen, 2017, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Ctesiphon, New York and the moorhen, 2017, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Evening star, 2017, oil on canvas, 35 x 27 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Evening star, 2017, oil on canvas, 35 x 27 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Exhibition view (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Exhibition view (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Cabeça vasa, 2017, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Cabeça vasa, 2017, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 140 x 120 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 140 x 120 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Exhibition view (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Exhibition view (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Time measuring, 2017, oil on canvas, 46 x 38 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Time measuring, 2017, oil on canvas, 46 x 38 cm (photo: Bruno Lopes)

Atrás do pensamento (Behind thought) is the title of Tiago Baptista’s upcoming solo show at gallery 3+1 Arte Contemporânea.

At first glance the painting of Tiago Baptista (Leiria 1986) is like a sequence of landscapes that confront us with images with a powerful cinematographic component, in the sense that each painting is like a moment in a narrative within the spectrum of other narratives. Titled Atrás do pensamento (Behind thought), the exhibition paradoxically convokes that movement that could be a pursuit of reflection and thought as subjective process or, simultaneously, an apparent absurdity vis-à-vis the consciousness of the being that thinks itself but chooses another path to free itself from the word which, under the aegis of understanding, obstructs it vis-à-vis the objectivity and hypothetical value of truth.

The title of the exhibition was ransomed from a sentence by writer Clarice Lispector, in the book “Água Viva (Stream of life)”, which says the following: “I am after what´s behind thought”. This sentence introduces another type of bond in the artist’s work. A bond beyond cinematography, consisting of literature and the images gleaned from reading it. Tiago Baptista is a rebellious, unbridled, defying reader in the compositional process of constructing his paintings. He is defying because, beyond the literary or cinematographic references, acts and modes of doing emerge on the different planes of the canvas that only painting is capable of transforming into image, even if its signification is hardly available to immediate interpretation.

Various objects, as well as human and anthropomorphic figures, are subject to a transmutation that engenders a dystopian, asynchronous movement within the compositional frame, as if we were confronted with several dimensions of imagination and memory, the latter being questioned and pierced through by symbols, landscapes, constructions or ruins that we recognize in a glimpse, but which seem to loose meaning and any bond of verisimilitude with their existence and real signification. In its framing, painting as totality reminds us of all that was left out, of all that places us in the counterfield of the image that we see.

Ours is the last, but also the first movement to invert the direction of thought and delve into the discursive field of his painting; to observe the elements that his painting builds, even those that seem accidental, be they geometric, gestural or disproportionate. Even before trying to understand them.

João Silverio, 12.2017 | Translation: Rui Cascais Parada 2017

19.01.18 – 10.03.18
Opening 19.01.18 19h – 22h

Room sheet

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