Pedro cabrita reis biography for kids
File Note #12: Pedro Cabrita Reis
Pedro Cabrita Reis
The position and attitude of Pedro Cabrita Reis in contemporary art is complex — as opposed to complicated — and balanced. He moves through art and life with considerable ease. Cabrita Reis does not seem to care much about that old and problematic division between art and life, which artists usually approach with almost surgical care. Obviously, Cabrita Reis chooses life — in this sense, one might hope that the coinciding of Cabrita Reis’ exhibition with that of Francis Picabia at Camden Arts Centre is not sheer chance — but it is certainly not a matter of, in the words of Yves Klein, a ‘dépassement de la problématique de l’art’.
Considering Klein’s naïve / utopian / paranoid / megalomaniac / ironic enterprises, it even remains questionable whether Klein himself surpassed the issue of art. However, the work of Cabrita Reis testifies to fundamentally different intentions. Cabrita Reis wishes to formulate things within the artistic domain, from a deep understanding of the capacity, the consequences and perhaps especially, the limitations of such a formulation and he engages himself expressly in a ‘problématique de l’art’. Formally, he leans towards
a period in which modernism got stuck in its self-referential desire. It is clear that Cabrita Reis does not entirely agree with art as art’s context. The ‘what you see is what you get’ attitude in his work is not minimalist dogma, but just plain knowledge, affording a means of navigating skilfully the alleyways of life. He trades the minimal art object and its transcendent qualities foran immanent construction, and its speculative nature, for a metaphoricalor poetic order. In a total absence of didactic strategies or hints, which makes the oeuvre of Cabrita Reis a true relief in contemporary culture, he negotiates the elements that define space as place, time as now, abstraction as immanence and meaning as individual thought.
The perspective in the output of
ARTIST MONOGRAPHS
| ACTIVE BACKLIST Pedro Cabrita Reis: Tree of Light |
Pedro Cabrita Reis: Tree of Light
Published by Ivorypress.
Edited by Elena Ochoa Foster.
This pocket-sized monograph records a recent body of work from the much-admired Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis (born 1956). The black-and-white photographs in Tree of Light are intimate portraits of thousand-year-old olive trees that the artist maintains in a grove near his home in the Algarve.
PUBLISHER
Ivorypress
BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 4.25 x 6 in. / 120 pgs / 109 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 8/31/2012
Active
DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2012 p. 184
PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788493949808TRADE
List Price: $25.00 CAD $34.50
AVAILABILITY
In stock
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Pedro Cabrita Reis: One After Another, A Few Silent Steps
Published by Hatje Cantz.
Edited by Sabrina van der Ley. Text by Dieter Schwarz, António Lobo Antunes, Pedro Cabrita Reis.
Since the early 1990s, the work o
Pedro Cabrita Reis
This lavishly illustrated book, published by Hatje Cantz in 2003, provides a comprehensive overview of Cabrita`s work from the mid-eighties to 2003 and includes writings by the artist as well as a bibliography and catalogue raisonné.
Cabrita, born in 1956 in Lisbon, is one of the most significant Portuguese artists alive today. His complex oeuvre encompasses a variety of media: painting, sculpture, and site-specific installations composed of found and manufactured objects. Often employing simple and common materials, his works touch on issues of space, architecture, and memory, with a suggestive power of association that goes beyond the visual to a metaphorical level. Cabrita's work brings together the subjective individual conscience and everyday life, thus inducing a reconstruction of individual and collective memory, creating an expansion of meaning, and proposing a reconstruction of the world. Cabrita has been featured in international exhibitions such as documenta IX and the XXIV São Paulo Biennial, and he represents Portugal at the 50th Venice Biennale in the summer of 2003. This lavishly illustrated book provides a comprehensive overview of Cabrita`s work from the mid-eighties to the present and includes writings by the artist as well as a bibliography and catalogue raisonné. With texts by Joao Fernandes, José M. Miranda Justo, Michael Tarantino, contributions by Adrian Searle.
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253 concrete, iron and wood structures covered in white paint stand at the place d'Armes of the fort Saint-Jean: The Forest (Marseille) is a sculpture by the Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis, a unique work specially created for the Mucem.
Made from industrial materials, this concrete Forest is set in the Mucem’s landscape, between architecture and garden, linking space and horizon in an intimate dialogue.
Of varying height (between 140 cm and 190 cm), the 253 structures conjure up anthropomorphic resonances, that are perceptible behind a possible (and necessarily ambiguous) reference to the outline of tree trunks. Are they a group of dead trees? Have they been ravaged by fire? Are they petrified? So long as they are not a group of people? Forests have always inspired a type of fear, similarly moreover to that aroused by gatherings of crowds.
Interview with the artist Pedro Cabrita Reis
Mucem (M.)
Why did you want to set up a forest in the mineral space at the place d’Armes of the fort Saint-Jean?
Pedro Cabrita Reis (P. C. R.)
To go through or to “lose oneself” in a forest – this always brings about in us a type of introspection and a process of rediscovery of oneself. This is a little like what can happen in the way we relate to a work of art.
M.
Concrete, iron, paint – this forest built thanks to industrial materials is also in a way a reminder of the city...
P. C. R.
The prime symbol of human construction, cities like forests are “organic” structures that experience several life cycles. There are cities and forests that have disappeared and have been replaced by other cities and forests, at the same time both similar yet different. Beyond all of this, but also like a symptom of these permanent transformations, there is art, the place where a forest can be constructed in iron and be a reminder of the city…
M. Lastly, the 253 structures can also be treated as a group of people, as a crowd… What was