This exhibition carries some of the leitmotifs presented by the artist
in his recent solo shows 'Rolling!' and 'Neither', at Cristina Guerra
Contemporary Art, Lisbon, and Galerie Blickensdorff, Berlin. The
installation of object/sculpture and photographic collage puts into
question the relationships of artist versus character; character
versus viewer, and viewer versus artist.
The self-fuelling curiosity
about what it is like to live inside the skin of someone else
continues to motivate the construction of Sendas' fictional
characters. Emphasizing on the use of first-person perspective, he
also appeals to a primordial type of anxiety: the anxiety related to
death. In harmony with Deleuzian references, Noé Sendas has recently
come to include the puncturing of space through the inclusion of
individuals, mannequins with bodily proportions of the artist himself,
reawakening the question of presence through doubt about the
possibility of presence.
In perceptive terms, these doubles are
hyper-realistic, credibly dressed in real clothing; but they are
faceless, almost pure bodily models to the scale of the spectator on a
one-to-one reality relationship. In fact, these characters define a
theatrical concept: they are waiting, awaking memories of Beckett, and
somehow transforming the exhibition space around them – by their very
specific nature – into real space. From his inventory of perception as
the construct of a phenomenology of the body, Sendas builds a flux of
sampled references. This flux of samples, which is reworked by the
artist into a unified body, activates the theatrical device of
presence, transforming the exhibition space into a space where the
beholder finds, as a presence, the scale of his own body.
