three artists exhibited in the shadows question the state of the world at the Center Pompidou

The rest is shadow, the title is taken from a verse by the poet Fernando Pessoa. It is in the half-light that three Portuguese artists, the sculptor Rui Chafes, the filmmaker Pedro Costa, the photographer Paulo Nozolino, bring their works into dialogue at the Center Pompidou, drawing up a dark observation of the world and of humanity.

We are greeted by a small format video embedded in the wall: a man hides his view with his hands. And then you enter darkness, like a dark room or a movie theatre. We don’t know whether to go straight, to the right, to the left, we are afraid of bumping into each other. Little by little, the eye gets used to it and we begin to distinguish the works, to imagine the labyrinthine path that leads us from one room to another where sculptures, photographs and films respond to each other.

A scenography that “takes the opposite of the white cube (exhibition space with white walls, editor’s note) and the idea that the works must be visible in the definition of their outline. The effect of exposure is replaced by the effect of appearance”. explains Philippe-Alain Michaud, head of the experimental cinema department at the National Museum of Modern Art and curator of the exhibition with Jonathan Pouthier, conservation officer at the museum.

Rui Chafes, sculptor, Pedro Costa, filmmaker, and Paulo Nozolino, photographer, who all live in Lisbon, have already exhibited together, with other artists, at the Serralves museum in Porto. They continue the adventure in Paris: “It’s not a juxtaposition of three works, they worked together and wanted their works to interfere, to resonate together”says Philippe-Alain Michaud.

Pedro Costa (born in 1959), selected at Cannes in the Un certain regard section with House of Lava in 1994 and Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2019 for Vitalina Varela, used the rushes of his films released at the cinema for the exhibition. In the largest room, suspended screens show three immobile young women, with an impressive presence, whose only hair moves in the wind in front of a landscape, and then Vitalina, Costa’s favorite actress, non-professional, whose black skin shines in the light. ‘darkness.

The figures of Pedro Costa dialogue with sculptures by Rui Chafes, also suspended, like strange and somewhat disturbing seaweed. Exhibited in Portugal and abroad, notably in Venice and São Paulo, and in Paris at the Giacometti Foundation in 2018, Rui Chafes (born in 1966) generally works with metal, painted black.

The works are few, “a real choice, the three artists place themselves in an economy of images, perhaps in reaction to a society dominated by the abundance of images”, notes Jonathan Pouthier. They are divided into six rooms, three in dialogue and one devoted to each of the artists.

Paulo Nozolino (born in 1955), national grand prize for photography in Portugal in 2006, works alone, over the course of peregrinations that have taken him to Arab countries and then to the four corners of Europe. He always works in black and white silver and exhibits large prints, generally gathered in triptychs. His stripped down and intense images are high contrast and rather dark. They often bear the traces of the dramas of recent history or echo them. In a small room, a child who died in Sarajevo sits alongside a scarred, horizontal sculpture by Rui Chafes in the shape of a tombstone that seems to float above the ground.

Coincidentally with tragedy, in the room dedicated to him, he had chosen, well before the exhibition, a triptych of desolate images taken in the suburbs of kyiv on the road to Chernobyl in 2008.

Pedro Costa, for his part, worked a lot for his films with Cape Verdean immigrants from the Fontaínhas district in Lisbon, whose maze of alleys echoes the labyrinthine aspect of the exhibition. He offers a double projection from the rushes of his film Vanda’s room (2000), where we see the demolition of the district, which has now disappeared.

A walled-up window by Paulo Nozolino is the last image before exiting into the light. Is the future totally blocked?

“The rest is shadow, Pedro Costa, Rui Chafes, Paulo Nozolino”
Center Pompidou, gallery 4, Paris 4th
Every day except Tuesday and May 1, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Thursday until 11 p.m.
from June 8 to August 22, 2022

The exhibition is presented as part of the France-Portugal Season 2022

The films of Pedro Costa are the subject of a retrospective at the Jeu de Paume (until June 26) and the Galerie les Filles du Calvaire is exhibiting photographs by Paulo Nozolino at L’Entrepôt (Paris 14th, until July 9 )