Field/Counterfield

José Pedro Croft (Porto, 1957), one of the main representatives of the renewal of sculpture in Portugal, presents at the Cerezales Antonino and Cinia Foundation [FCAYC] a large-format sculptural intervention that addresses the relationships between form and space. In line with his previous works, which develop certain aspects of minimalism and conceptual art, the intervention is situated at the intersection formed by architecture and the body itself in relation to it.

The FCAYC's distinctive architecture, in which the built form integrates seamlessly with the landscape, serves José Pedro Croft as a way to demonstrate how art in general, and his sculptural practice in particular, presents itself as a kind of intermediate territory. In that field Time and space are measured differently: the sculptural installation creates a series of passageways that, as they are traversed, alter the conventional relationships between architecture, landscape, and body. In this transit, references between inside and outside are lost, leaving one environment only to enter another in a kind of architecture inside of architecture. The boundaries blur and reconfigure at every step.

The colour fields generated by the enormous metal plates that make up the installation are in turn a product of artificeColour palettes inspired by late Renaissance sculptures and paintings, far removed from any idea of “natural” colour. It is an idealised colour that also changes on each side of each plate. Croft's proposal seeks the fluidity and expansion of the energy generated both by the constructive structures and these hyper-saturated colour fields.

This feeling of transience, of something constantly in the process of being made, is one of the defining characteristics of José Pedro Croft's work. In the project for the FCAYC, this is taken to the extreme as it is a kind of “sculpture to assemble” that will change its configuration when it is subsequently presented at the Convent of Santa Clara-a-Nova in Coimbra, a Renaissance setting very far removed from the contemporary architectural context presented by the FCAYC.

At Field/Counterfield José Pedro Croft offers us a powerful glimpse into his working process: the activation of space only arises when, after conceptualising what happens there – and what happens to the subject. at space - the artist begins to add elements to create conflict and question that relationship. In the words of Aurora García, Croft is “interested in the generative aspects of art, what a given form and material is capable of originating, not as an introspective object that only admits the isolated confirmation of its status, but as something related to the complexity of the world and of existence.”.