MY WITNESS IS THE EMPTY SKY (Group Show)
10th Dec 2022 — 27th Jan 2023

Body, landscape and place. A place is a space occupied by a body, its position, order and time. The landscape is the extension of territory that the gaze can reach. It contains, covers and becomes a spectator of the body that occupies that place.

‘My Witness Is The Empty Sky’, Plato’s second group show, proposes a reflection on the landscape as a witness to our action. Kerouac writes in Some of the Dharma (1997) about the conformation of the individual with nature, the fullness of individual existence. This curatorial project starts from this premise and explores the territories of emptiness, solitude, and nostalgia. We can see in this exhibition, the metaphor of emptiness as a trace, memory, landscape, and time. Nostalgia for the place as a reflection of our own identity. In ten different ways, these themes are explored through the works of ten artists. Each work is an individual confrontation between the body and the place, and the marks they create over time.

¶ Andrew Huff creates forms alluding to previous narratives and the passage of time. The different layers of paint cover hidden compositions, which are only alluded to through remnants of bumps and pieces of paint left behind from previous works. These tactile cues act as markers of past experiences, remembered or forgotten. ¶ Martîm explores the theme of the body and the sensorial landscape. With the use of a set of symbols related to the experience of interior space, he creates imagined, dreamlike, and intensely intimate natures. ¶ Tiago Rocha Costa resorts to an interdisciplinary imaginary to question the concept of «nature» as an idyllic territory, independent of human intervention. His work overlaps the objectivity of scientific knowledge with new fictions, fragments, and traces of times past or yet to be imagined. ¶ Benedetta Ristori focuses on the tension between a form and the space it occupies, where it is contained. The outside world is viewed and represented through suspended atmospheres, in scenic realism with no space-time constraints. ¶ Ike Ferreira evokes the spatialism of the 60s, building a visual landscape of words, in a diptych that is a personal fragment, a poem and a confession. ¶ Maria Albergaria enacts a new form of communication, where the cloth, the line, and the stain are decontextualized. Each cloth reconfigures itself like a page of writing with a new code, an encryption of an inner language. ¶ Joana Alvarez seeks, through photography, to represent the duality of elements, by recording the things that surround us and what they mimic. The landscape mirrors, in an allegory, our body. ¶ Francisco Baccaro works on the abstraction of a commonplace, on the dematerialization of forms and landscape. ¶ Teresa Arêde proposes an exercise on the issue of metamorphosis, and mutation. Paraffin and wax dissolve to build each object, and on its surface, the contours of illustrations from alchemical manuals from the 17th century survive. The voice, following the same paths, dissolves or gathers - from the liquid state to the sound saturation that almost solidifies it. ¶ André Vaz creates an installation that performs a single movement: that of sculpting a block of time. Through a set of paradoxes, of fragments that dialogue with each other, it discusses the coexistence of the self with nature and how this lasts and transforms over time. ¶