TIME LAPSE

With Theodore Ereira-Guyer

On view at Fonte, 751 rua Mourato Coelho, Pinheiros, São Paulo, Brazil, from June the 23rd until July 25th 2022

Time has stopped, we´re in March 2020, Theodore has left Brazil on one of the last flights to Europe; leaving the artworks that he produced during his residency there, in São Paulo, with me.

I store and keep everything wrapped, as precious relics of a time that has gone to never return. One month passes, it´s good to have more time to read, to rest.

More months pass, life reorganizes itself from the inside. Sunbathing by the window isn´t an option anymore, the sun is lower already and only leaves a thin beam on the floor. Winter is almost there.

Nature seems to have launched an alert signal. Bucolic images, real or fake, of wildlife walking through cities are flowing from the internet. Locked in our houses from the landscape, all that remains are memories, images engraved into the retina of escapes and voyages that used to punctuate the cycle of work / rest.

Suspended time, and waiting. Waiting for all this to be over, for life to go back on track. But when? No one knows. It´s an open question. The sensation that something is about to happen. But what? We don´t know anything.

Mountains and landscapes. Theo left pieces of nature with me. Along with these, he also left faces fixed in gesso. Faces from the past that seem like funeral masks, and faces from the present. The mountains and the faces stare, observing each other, stored together in a small room in my apartment.

Time passes and dilates. The pandemic slows, seems to stop, comes back. Cycles repeat themselves. We try to adjust to a new rhythm, to tame the virus. The mountains and the hills follow their slow movement of sedimentation and erosion, their subtle changes, organizing our memories.

Indigenous tribes have specific words for this process. The mountains and the hills are always in the process of being mountains, of being hills. There is, in the wisdom of these people, a grammar of nature´s vitality. We´ve forgotten that we´re part of a whole, we´ve invented a fixed concept, a separation between us and nature, an abyss.

In Europe, Theo went on with his art. Deserts and lakes dialogue from the other side of the ocean with the terrestrial landscapes he left behind in São Paulo. They seem to talk about absence, of a feeling of loss. They also are in constant movement. Life and death. Infinite cycles. Sand disperses, lakes dry out and revert to their previous states to the rhythm of the rain showers. Rivers flow through the shifting landscapes that we set in our memories.

In Theo´s artwork, time contracts in an attempt to capture the invisible. Paintings, engravings, etchings and sculptures constitute physical receptacles of evanescent memories, of the displacement of bodies in time and space. Imaginary and existing landscapes merge, memories in movement. Eyes of gesso contemplate, motionless. What will remain of us? Only the mountains know.

We´re in June of 2022, more than two years have passed. Life came back, different and at the same time, identical.  The mountains, the deserts and the lakes continue their slow dance.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer's (works and lives between London - UK and Lisboa – PT) practice switches between print, sculpture and painting. He studied at the Colégio das Artes at University of Coimbra in Portugal, Central Saint Martins, NUA and the Royal College of Art in London.

Ereira-Guyer work is held in private and public collections throughout the world including the MoMA, YALE Centre For British Art, TATE, The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the British Museum, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian and the Pompidou Centre. He was the recipient of the Helen Chadwick Award for multidisciplinary artists.