Pedro Cabrita Reis

Pedro Cabrita Reis' works consist of commonplace surroundings, construction materials and architectural semantic appropriated from an existing reality and miraculously transformed into altars of an almost spiritual experience. Practicing his alchemy of the everyday, the artist turns the familiar into sublime, the trivial into a precious and valuable, achieving the noble levels of human perception, emotion and appreciation of the world.

Pedro Cabrita Reis enters the almost neo-baroque upper floor of the Kunsthaus Graz with a particular modesty and humility: his True Gardens #6 (Graz) is a maze of light and glass, supported by wooden blocks and distributed regularly through the open curvilinear surface of Space01. As such, with its rigor of horizontality and flatness, it recalls a painterly tableau of possible narratives that performs both a harmony and a contrast, and acts simultaneously as a gesture of disagreement and embrace towards its hosting site and its dynamic geometry. 
The industrial materials (neon tubes, glass sheets, rough wooden modules, meters of electric wires) and the visible signs of working process turn the space into a massive construction site where mental and physical labors contribute to reveal a meaning and a mystery of the inner and outer worlds. Cabrita Reis’ performative installation radiates with the intensity of light, and the silence which mutates into an almost disquieting stillness generates a poetic dimension which transforms the space into a site of contemplation and a melancholic palace of spatial communion.

"I believe that in any Artwork what is to be perceived is that very particular, brief and silent moment when one experiences Intelligence, an absolute and total Intelligence through which everything comes together … Being a revelation of all our fears, Art neither changes life nor explains death. Such magnificent inability to provide a destiny makes Art different from Science, Religion and Philosophy. As an attempt for meaning/sense, this might as well be (why not?) a search for Beauty. I like to see my work as a part of this method of thinking …" 
(Pedro Cabrita Reis)

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Additional programme

Tuesday, February 12, 2008/7pm, Space04
Film screening The Draughtsman's Contract 

Tuesday, April 22, 2008/7pm, Space04
Film screening L‘Année Dernière à Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad

Tuesday, April 29, 2008/7pm, Space04
Lectures
Felicity D. Scott: One or Many Truths 
Philip Ursprung: "Ruins in Reverse". The Art of Pedro Cabrita Reis and the Eternal Present