I'M FINE IF YOU'RE FINE
ARTROOM (LISBON)
29.09 - 02.10.2022
ARTROOM (LISBON)
29.09 - 02.10.2022
The title of this exhibition comes from a recent discovery about the concepts of care, empathy and friendship in a contemporary evaluation of the political, social and economic state of our world. While doing research, however, what I most found interesting (and distracting) about it were the potential aesthetic parallels with Theodore and Lisette’s exhibition, mainly the two present subjects (the you and the I) and the word fine. I tested its’ potential by analysing it through an ironic elasticity. By comparing the initial context to an everyday situation, the question became “how to return them to daily life?". The ambiguity of the short words and common vocabulary — I’m fine if you’re fine — perfectly matched the direction chosen for this exhibition.
Both artists have dedicated the past months to a body of work which has aligned itself in distinct languages, building somehow towards a viewpoint of multiple-realities. On one hand displaying recognisable textures and domestic materials such as bright coloured wool, plastic beads, roughly cut jute, pastel plaster as well as natural seeds, on the other the composition of made up situations between the abstract and the whimsical, making it hard to tell exactly how to feel, scared, pleased, happy, sad, in love? or simply fine. The vagueness is however undetermined, provoked purely by imaginative fantasies and endless possibilities. This exhibition is a portrait of familiar scenes masked with gestures of spontaneity and intuition from an oneiric dimension. And although these stories come from terrestrial hands, the entire show is a puzzled narrative of free writing and surreal cut-ups linked together in the space.
While discussing I’m fine if you’re fine between ourselves, we were able to establish a point of groundedness, a sense of power which matched our curatorial choices and now, after installing the show, a new notion of tension. Upon reflecting on fine, we found that it is not good or bad, it is just really what it is. Reality in whatever manner we want to see it. In this case, it might be a colourful bucolic landscape of women with no faces, hard to identify where they come from and if they are laughing or crying. Patterns created by tropical seeds in an attempt to bring nature to life while still archiving and keeping them from growing. Monstrous bodies trying to mend their actions by metamorphosing into jewels. Tombstone faces reminding us not to forget those who once lived.
Theodore Ereira-Guyer & Lisette van Hoogenhuyze
Both artists have dedicated the past months to a body of work which has aligned itself in distinct languages, building somehow towards a viewpoint of multiple-realities. On one hand displaying recognisable textures and domestic materials such as bright coloured wool, plastic beads, roughly cut jute, pastel plaster as well as natural seeds, on the other the composition of made up situations between the abstract and the whimsical, making it hard to tell exactly how to feel, scared, pleased, happy, sad, in love? or simply fine. The vagueness is however undetermined, provoked purely by imaginative fantasies and endless possibilities. This exhibition is a portrait of familiar scenes masked with gestures of spontaneity and intuition from an oneiric dimension. And although these stories come from terrestrial hands, the entire show is a puzzled narrative of free writing and surreal cut-ups linked together in the space.
While discussing I’m fine if you’re fine between ourselves, we were able to establish a point of groundedness, a sense of power which matched our curatorial choices and now, after installing the show, a new notion of tension. Upon reflecting on fine, we found that it is not good or bad, it is just really what it is. Reality in whatever manner we want to see it. In this case, it might be a colourful bucolic landscape of women with no faces, hard to identify where they come from and if they are laughing or crying. Patterns created by tropical seeds in an attempt to bring nature to life while still archiving and keeping them from growing. Monstrous bodies trying to mend their actions by metamorphosing into jewels. Tombstone faces reminding us not to forget those who once lived.
Theodore Ereira-Guyer & Lisette van Hoogenhuyze
