Marco Pires

The artistic practice of Marco Pires develops from the construction of work modules around specific fields of representation: maps, landscapes, buildings, constructions. His research establishes a line of thought about what determines our gaze, and about its possible representations, disturbances, lacks or limits. His work process sets free a series of strategies for the adulteration of codes, rules and taxonomy of original documents (maps, photographs, plans), though the use of visual techniques such as overlapping, simplification, or distortion, creating a new typology distinguished by its hybrid character, freedom and autonomy from any correspondence with reality. The series Mapas, constituted as a block of works parallel to the series Rebatimento, focuses on cartography and the idea of map as a method for the representation and interpretation of a specific geographical, social and political landscape. The unified set of paintings of this series folds out into two proposals: the images produced from orthogonal plans, and the images that contain modified original documents. The whole presents a typology of its own based on a dialogue with the accepted methods for the representation of a particular reality. On the other hand, the series Rebatimento is concentrated on the spatial abstraction device, referring to the process that precedes any form of cartography or mapping: descriptive geometry. The nine elements that are presented, half-opened, drawing a common acute angle with the plane of the wall, materialize the resources (projection lines, perspective and axis) of the projection of the represented reality.