Relógio de Sol, by Pedro Barassi & Pedro Liñares
28th October — 24th November 2023

 “That night I slept very badly. It was hot and when I left the house I forgot my glasses, which caused me great discomfort as I couldn’t see in the strong daylight. When I arrived here I remember crossing a long corridor and turning right after the coffee machine where there was a small wooden door that led to the top floor of the building. I suddenly lose myself in the vision of some kind of balcony. All the memories are the same as yesterday, anyway, I’m not the same. It’s lunchtime and I hear machine noises and distinct voices around. Everything that could be, over time, just another habit in the erratic journey of chances, became my greatest fear. I no longer knew if I had crossed two streets or the same street twice.

Outside the banks of the river, the smoke produced by cargo ships, and a few steps away, a small refuge facing west and, further down, the marble staircase. The day displaces and confuses the shadows around me and at this moment my dream falls apart. The habit of inventing prophetic situations and the trail of everyday gestures left impressions on reality and created an impossible scene before my eyes. The volumes that formed a penumbra at an angle were more than structures made of concrete. I, worked by time and barbaric life, no longer knew how to listen to words. From the moment of vertigo, where the past and present become confused, nothing makes sense anymore.“

In ‘Relógio de Sol’, exhibited at Galeria PLATO, Pedro Barassi and Pedro Liñares present a video installation and a series of paintings in an immersive environment. The exhibition, which revolves around the short film of the same name, addresses issues related to the dichotomy between the prophetic and the mundane, the routine and the extraordinary. Filmed in the artists’ old studio in Lisbon, the film is full of a personal and contemplative atmosphere, where characters, objects, and space mix in a kind of reverie. In the film, the main character and the script were created in co-authorship, as was the painting “Da condição de vertigem (Na condição de cenário)”, which made possible the creation of a new reference point. This approach ends up manifesting itself both in the works and in the conceptualization of the exhibition itself.

Just as in “Prosa do Observatório”1 by Julio Cortázar, analogous associations are proposed between distant elements. In the book full of symbols, stories, and reflections, poetic prose and photographs interpellate each other and gain multiple meanings, and the reader is invited to observe the in-between: “this way of being between, not above or behind, but between, [ ...] sheltered from other hours [...] hole in the web of time” (p. 9). Likewise in ‘Relógio de Sol’ the paintings produced and selected suggest a non-linear and complementary dialogue to the film, having been created specifically for this exhibition.

Pedro Barassi was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1988 and lives between Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. He has a degree in Design Graphic from PUC-Rio in 2012. Participated in independent publication fairs and group shows since 2016 and attended the School of Visual Arts (EAV) between 2014 and 2017. He has a master's degree in Painting from FBAUL, where he completed his dissertation project in 2021. He held a solo show in 2022 named "Antinatural" at the Módulo Centro Difusor de Arte, Lisbon, where he currently lives and works. Investigate how the juxtaposition of everyday phenomena tends to assume an active role in the content of compositions.

Pedro Liñares (b.1988) is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist who lives and works between Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. He graduated from EAV-Parque Lage (2014), attended the visual arts course at the School of Fine Arts of Rio de Janeiro (2015-2017) and has a degree in International Relations from PUC-RJ (2012). He has a master's degree in multimedia art from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon and has dedicated himself to research in contemporary art since 2014. He works with a non-narrative approach and his works explore how image information can be superimposed and reused for new purposes. Using videos, installations and paintings he suggests slices of our contemporary reality, its complexity and explores the everyday image through its ambiguity of meaning.