Solo show curated by João Silvério
The exhibition "One of a Kind" by Noé Sendas is conceived as an essay on photographic objects and drawing. Building upon his "Crystal Girls" series, initiated in 2009 and published in the book Noé Sendas · Vanishing Acts (SKYRA, Milan, 2020), the artist revisits and continues his modus operandi by developing a new series titled "One-off," which lends its name to this exhibition. This exhibition also includes an installation to be displayed in the gallery's black box, entitled "Light for a Black Box."
The work developed in the "Crystal Girls" series is closely linked to the artist's nomadic experience, moving between his studios located in a Lisbon/Madrid/Berlin triangle. In this context, the entire creative process was based on a practice where the laptop, his traveling studio, epitomized what we know as the 'digital nomad.'
The new and unpublished works for this exhibition, from the series entitled "One-off," determine a different modality in his process. Now based in his Lisbon studio, the time for reflection and craftsmanship is extended, giving rise to an experimentation of gesture, wear, and the use of other materials, recognizable in the drawing practice to which each photographic object is subjected. It is akin to an alchemical process that unfolds in transfigurations and erasures, revisiting the materiality of the photographic negative as an artistic object, not as a reproductive matrix for a new work. Thus, in this new series, each photograph contains its own negative, making it unique and unrepeatable.viralagenda.com
"One of a Kind," as a visual installation in the exhibition room, presents itself as a crossing of narratives and fragments of other stories, a drift through the poetics and references that characterize Sendas's work. A choreography of figures, scenarios, and places projected between period cinema, the modernism that our memory rescues, and a certain idea of melancholy, present in the manual transformation of each image that returns to us the gesture that can be verb, sensation, mirror, and memory, simultaneously the index of another fiction.
Centro Cultural de Lagos
Lagos, Portugal