On the threshold between sculpture, installation, drawing and painting, Mauro Cerqueira (Guimarães, Portugal, 1982) has an artistic practice that is as sensitive to aesthetic thought as criticism. The contemporary as a catalyst for fractures in the social fabric emerges as a problem to which his work reacts.

The city where he lives, Porto, its peripheral spaces and its centre serve as both subject and material when the artist works on unusual surfaces such as mirrors or pressed cardboard, from building materials such as sand and tar, and found objects such as pieces of electronic equipment and chains. In this expansion of the field of painting and sculpture, Mauro Cerqueira creates material forms for the ghostly presences that inhabit city life. Using the key of abstraction rather than documentation, the transformations and fissures caused by real estate speculation, the precariousness of the proletarian classes and the impoverishment of life make the artist’s work converse in a language that borders on the universal.

von Hand zu Hand, 2021

Installation, variable materials and dimensions

Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Nuno Centeno.

The imminence of the accident is a presence that constantly hovers over Mauro Cerqueira’s work. In the installation von Hand zu Hand, three sculptures made from objects found in thrift shops form an image of instability, like a photograph depicting the minutes before a chaotic incident. Three sculptural hands on a non-human scale: one of them “holds” a large piece of glass in fragile balance, very close to dropping it; the other touches a tubular piece containing water inside, threatening to knock it to the ground and cause the liquid to spill; the third is suspended by a metal chain attached to the ceiling, “flying” over a piece of glass that would break under the weight of its eventual fall. Originally created as part of the Los Angeles artist residency in Günsterode, Germany, the installation has been adapted to one of the former military workshops outside the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova. The scene seems to challenge a formal tension and unpredictability that coexist with the phantasms of the venue’s recent past, which, in Mauro Cerqueira’s work, are related to many of the stories that plague his imagery.