Title: Portugal: Scenario

Artist: Francisco Tropa

Curator: Sergio Mah

Venue: Fondaco Marcello, Calle del Traghetto o Ca’ Garzoni, San Marco

Scenario is an exhibition which articulates sculpture, image devices and fragments of nature, where specific attention is paid to assembly and occupation of the exhibition space, to the placement of things, their nature and relationships, so they can be seen and experienced. The general ambience of the exhibition is timeless and enigmatic, in which objects and images have a heuristic quality, seeking a sensitive and subjective understanding of the nature of things and consequently of the experience of creation and the origins of art.  Scenario involves the construction of a space, the indication of a space in suspension, which suggests a huge possibility: to hold our attention, to summon up the experience of creation, to urge on the imagination as a way to reach the truth of nature and consequently the origins of art making. This Scenario is definitely the space of alterity, of alteration, in which mind and body, image and object, figuration and abstraction, nature and art stop being dissociable notions. It is a space wherein imagery is taken as being a large theatre of memory – ample, involuntary, inventive and metamorphic – whose existence is regenerated in each sufficiently creative image to mobilise the viewer’s perception via an unusual pattern of routes. Vision is simultaneously suspended and freed, to stimulate the imagination and unbidden memories that renew the world, in the search for a new light, the awe of a new image about which appropriate knowledge is still lacking. These are images that shift between the recognisable and the indiscernible, between the expectation of reproducing something specific in a manner more literal or tending to the abstract, and that of representing their projective and speculative potential, the possibility of recreating appearances and inciting the generative capability of the images. What Tropa has here achieved is evidently a form of demand for observation, one where the viewer completes this cycle, but without them these objects remain indiscriminate images, never fully achieving their potential.

Emily Burke