The installation Da natureza das coisas tudo acaba, 2014, by Carlos Nogueira, a work that belongs to the Collection Caixa Geral de Depósitos, is our current highlight as it is on loan to the exhibition Carlos Nogueira. água. e a casa é o mundo, curated by Catarina Rosendo. The show is open at Palácio dos Anjos, Algés, between September 21 and December 29, 2023.

Carlos Nogueira's academy training was divided between Sculpture, at Escola Superior de Belas-Artes, Porto, and Painting, at its sister school in Lisbon. It is this double calling that perhaps disturbs the flow of his artistic production since the 70s as he extends his creations to installations, architectural and performative works, which are triggered by the viewer’s perception. Introducing the exhibition Da natureza das coisas tudo acaba, Culturgest-Porto, 2014, Miguel Wandschneider says: “The search for a sense of totality that combines and correlates the sensitive and the intelligible, the visible and the invisible, the ephemeral and the permanent, the sacred (that what is transcendent) and the profane (that what is ordinary and routine) has always underlied his work.” Also shown at this exhibition was the installation Da natureza das coisas tudo acaba, “an insightful work that covers and synthesizes the artist’s forty-year work vocabulary, grammar and poetics, and which embodies the many objects (materials and forms) that have been occupying the artist’s home or studio.” On a modular shelf with 44 units, the artist displays 142 objects of different origins, purposes, materials and shapes, he describes as “a set of elements that make my own vocabulary of shapes”. It appears to be a kind of alphabet or a catalogue of options that, with different meanings, can be joined to form phrases, ideas or symbolic concepts. By inspiring a plural understanding of art and everyday life, this multitude of views seems to compare these worlds, as if they had become just one and the same. The objects are displayed on a metal shelf, as in a collection storage room, ready to take part in a museography. As though the importance of their classification and preservation would elevate them to an archival level that must be preserved because of their own value, because they are just what they are. Although this literal dimension seems to go against their possible meanings, it is the confrontation, the dialogue or comparison between the different objects that allows the observer to understand them, their stories and their future.

Carlos Nogueira received a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1982-83), from FLAD – Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (1989) and from the Ministry of Culture (1989-90).

Hugo Dinis