Diogo Pimentão | Proportions of Silence
16th May - 27th July 2024
Rua De São Bernardo 15, Lisbon
Encounter is pleased to present Diogo Pimentão | Proportions of Silence, opening on Thursday 16th May, 2024. The exhibition brings together several significant series of new work created during 2024 and marks Pimentão’s first solo project with the gallery. In this exhibition, the materials of paper and graphite are utilised by the artist as sites of resistance and yield, setting up a dialectic between strength and precarity, power and vulnerability, the handmade and the minimal. Pimentão continues his investigations into an expanded field of drawing and mark making utilising a method he calls ‘blind drawing’. There is a bodily choreography that is layered into the process of making for the artist. His enigmatic works complicate boundaries between drawing and sculpture, performance and permanence, sound and stillness.
The exhibition will run until 27th July 2024.
Exhibition Text | Joana P. R. Neves
Diogo Pimentão is one of those innovators who simultaneously connects us to the pre-historic finger flutings in the Rouffignac caves, and to an utterly contemporary, de-hierarchised and singular form of drawing formally reminiscent of Minimalist music and sculpture[1]. He uses the traditional tools of the discipline, which is easy to overlook such are the surprising uses he makes of pencil and paper. His work pushes the boundaries of mark-making and often takes up the space where the spectator usually stands to look at a drawing on the wall. The series Synchronised (Alignment) #1, #2, #3 (2024) is a materialised line in space inhibiting movement in the room, thus taking on a political tone. How do you build a space for everyone’s unequal needs? How do you create equanimity? How do you move?
He often claims not to be interested in representation, that is, the hand-eye coordination necessary to produce a realistic image and the realistic image itself. Rather, his works on paper (but also cement, organic matter, books, graphite beads and reclaimed paper cuts) are a reflexion on power and vulnerability through a collaboration of sorts with materials, and even animals in the work Region(s) (2024) – the squirrels hoarding nuts in his garden. He is concerned with the cyclic nature of life and therefore reclaims the cut edges of his drawings to produce a collage resembling a score or sound vibration (Folded Sound (residue), 2024). Indeed, these cuts are often referred to by him as the release from the monotonal sound of drawing lines, an interruption of the minimal music of drawing. This also has an impact on breathing, as many artists have claimed; Pimentão considers that the whole body draws.
His gestures of this repetitive and meditative handmaking were instilled by a domestic savoir-faire inherited from his grandmother, who not only taught him that “o material tem a sua ciência” (“materials have a science of their own”), but also passed on to him one of his most grounding techniques, folding. Laundry for her, paper for him – perfectly, obsessively, hiding the edges and thus producing an endless movement like an embrace. His grandmother shared her knowledge of house economics: never waste; reclaim, re-use. Instilling this ethos in the tradition of minimalism could appear obtuse two decades ago, at the start of his career, but it has acquired an urgency and a mode of resistance now.
When he started working with the widest 300g paper he could find (sold as heavy, large rolls), his own body established a kinship with paper’s qualities of resistance, balance, yield. Diogo Pimentão was an extreme sports afficionado when he was growing up in Portugal by the sea, a passion channelled by his fascination with the movement of the human body in water, air, against solid matter. With momentum, which intuitively and physically measures the limit of disequilibrium, his sculptures of paper folded onto itself are reminiscent of these figures the body performs when surfing, skating or cliff diving. He associates them with materials that have been invisible throughout history – pencil and paper –, holding images but never really considered for themselves.
Diogo Pimentão’s work is a hybrid association between figures of recent abstract history (Morton Feldman, Agnes Martin, Yvonne Rainer, Richard Nonas, the Mono-Ha movement, Fernando Calhau and many others) and a far more unconventional daily practice of concentration on small invisible gestures – rather than conceptual constructs – that prepare the mind for the world. He believes in communication beyond words, in a world where language is an embodied form of nomadic attention to catch the ephemeral without breaking it. His series of works resembling a prayer bead necklace is reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhism, whose philosophy he feels close to. Each bead is rubbed while reciting a mantra; his blind drawings also move the beads around and shape them during an intense and exerting performance (at times solitary and in a few occurrences in front of an audience). The sound of the drawing leaves an echo in the body of the artist, whose movement produced the sound. The drawing emanating from this experience is not only a visual but a remnant humming taking over the body and the space, at times abruptly and other moments chaotically (such as in the sound scores), but always with a calm acceptance of the bustling noise of the world.
[1] He was featured in Phaidon’s Vitamin D2, New Perspectives of Drawing, 2015.
Planning your Visit
Encounter, Rua de São Bernardo 15 R/C, 1200-823, Estrela, Lisboa
Wednesday - Saturday 12-7pm and by appointment
Diogo Pimentão
Diogo Pimentão (Lisbon, 1973) lives and works in London. He studied art at Ar.Co., Lisbon; the Sculpture Seminar, Gotland, and the Centro Internacional de Escultura Pêro Pinheiro in Portugal.
Recent solo exhibitions include; ‘Proportions of Silence’, Encounter, Lisbon (2024, Upcoming), ‘Extended Touch’ Praz Delavallade, Paris (2023), ‘To Be Completed/ Por Completar’, Casa da Cerca Art Centre, Almada (2022), ‘Transitions Linéaire’, Drawing House, Paris (2022), ‘Drawing Backwards’, FRAC Rouen Normadie (2020), ‘Loud Whisper’, Rocio Santa Cruz, Barcelona (2019), ‘Drawing Body’, Cristina Guerra, Lisbon (2019), ‘Drawn Towards’, Kentler International Drawing Space, New York (2019), ‘Insignificantes’, Museu Nacional Grão Vasco, Viseu (2016), Disequilibrium Displacement, IMMA - Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2015). ‘Residual’, Museu de Arte Contemporânea - Colecção António Cachola, Elvas (2015). Recent institutional group exhibitions include; ‘Descuradas’, Colecção Norlinda e José Lima, São João da Madeira (2023), Collection Frédéric De Goldschmidt, Cloud Seven, Brussels (2021), Drawing Positions, CAB Fundación Caja De Burgos, Burgos (2020), ‘Constellations: a choreography of minimal gestures’, Museum Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2019), ‘MMIPO’, Museu da Misericordia, Porto (2018), ‘Intersticial II - Diálogos no Espaço entre Acontecimentos’, Portuguese Art at Norlinda and José Lima Collection, São João da Madeira (2018), ‘Spatial Flux’ Joann Gonzalez Hickey Collection, Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Colorado (2018), ‘(pre)Textos’, Foundation Otazu, Navarra (2018), ‘Resonance’, New Acquisitions, Frac Normandie Rouen, Rouen (2018), ‘Private Choices’, Centrale For Contemporary Art, Bruxelles (2017), ‘New Additions’ Kentler International Drawing Space, New York (2017), ‘Quote/ Unquote, Entre apropriação e Diálogo’, (Collection Foundation EDP), MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon (2017), ‘CAAA’, for the triennial of Architecture, Guimarães (2016), ‘New Acquisitions’, Serralves Foundation, Porto (2016), ‘Outiller le dessin’, Centre d’art La Panacée, Montpellier (2016), ’Papier XL’, Centre Georges Pompidou, Galerie d’art Graphique, Paris (2016), ‘Summer Guests’, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2016), ‘Abaixo as fronteiras’, ‘MACE Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas’, Colecção António Cachola, Elvas (2016), ‘Abaixo as fronteiras’, MUDE Museu de Design e de Moda, Colecção Francisco Capelo, Lisboa (2016).
Diogo Pimentão’s works are included in the collections of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, in Paris; Pomeranz Collection, Vienna; Center Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the European Central Bank; Collection Lambert, Avignon, FR; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (FSRR), IT; Thalie Foundation, Brussels, BE; Carmona e Costa Foundation, Lisbon, PT; European Central Bank, Berlin, DEU; Portugal Telecom Foundation, Lisbon, PT; Joann Gonzalez Hickey Collection, New York, US; Fonds National d’art contemporain, Paris, FR; PLMJ Foundation, Lisbon, PT; Serralves Foundation, Porto, PT; Kablanc Otazu Foundation, Pamplona, ES; EDP Foundation, Lisbon, PT; Museum of Contemporary Art - António Cachola Collection, Elvas, PT FRAC Alsace, Sélestat, FR; Leal Rios Foundation, Lisbon Portugal PT; MONA, Museum of old and new art, AU; Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, AT; European Central Bank; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, PT; FRAC Normandie, Rouen, FR.