Last month, local artist Alexandre Marreiros launched his latest solo exhibition Shelter at Blanc Art Gallery. The exhibition consists of two major parts: an installation on the ceiling and artworks on the walls. His new selection of works seek to deconstruct the generalized idea of shelter, which is universally associated with anything built, covered, and which offers us security. Yet, in recent times, security is something that many of us have been forced to redefine, in terms of our health, relationships, jobs and even homes.
“The exhibition explores the need to question and define what security is, what is this idea associated with a place, which can be a city, a house, a landscape, a person, or a far away a state of mind or feeling,” comments Alexandre. “I want to invite the visitor to question and redefine this learned concept of “shelter”, not as a built physical place, but as a feeling with its own time. And like everything in life, especially feelings, they are temporary, they are ephemeral.”
Curator of the exhibition, Emilia Tang adds: “Over the past few years, we have all been experiencing uncertainty, in an extreme and dramatic way with Covid, and lately, war. Through curating this exhibition I want to raise awareness about the content, the confidence, the safety-net feeling which the concept of “shelter” represents, that exists in all of us, the “shelter” living inside us, the one thing that keeps us believing in a better future and brings us hope. It’s never physical but an intangible feeling that exists through our interconnected bonding with other beings. By deconstructing the generalized idea of shelter, Alexandre plays beautifully with the fragments of undefined possibilities.”
Key to any physical shelter is of course a roof, and entering the exhibition, visitors are invited to look up to where more than 350 large helium balloons cover the entire ceiling of the gallery.
“The first element of this installation, balloons are associated with festive or commemorative moments, and are therefore temporal. The second element is the helium inserted into the balloon,” explains Alexandre. “Combining the two elements, we have the element of time. The balloons will lose helium during the exhibition and this reveals the time that the balloon is losing, which in turn is a metaphor for the idea that the shelter that protects us or covers us is temporal. The metamorphic idea that the balloon loses its helium and ends up becoming deformed over time, eventually gives a temporal and transformative dimension to the installation itself. In this sense, the exhibition changes with each passing day.”
From the horizontal plane of the ceiling, the visitor’s gaze is guided to the vertical plane of the walls, presenting a total of 20 previously unpublished works created specifically for this exhibition, ranging from paintings, to mixed technique and engravings.
“These works displayed on the wall are a consequence and record of this idea that proposes to deconstruct the definition of shelter,” notes the artist. “Shelter is a representation of what we think, of what experience makes us, not something that physically protects us. It is not an architectural thing that belongs to the domain and territory of man-made constructions, but of a territory built from experience, from intellect, and that exists in our way of being, our mental and emotional state, our thoughts about the empirical idea of a certain time and not a specific space.”
