Nuno Sousa

A square of wall is illuminated by a light spot, at the same time confronting it and depending from it; the power to feed the lamp comes from a plug in that same piece of wall. The relation between the two elements is ambivalent: the picture needs light to become visible, illuminated; on the other hand, the light spot needs the picture to be lit, and so to fulfill its function, to illuminate a surface, an object or a painting. Rather that referring to the monochrome, the whiteness of the piece of wall refers to the surface of an architectural space, through the texture of the sand paint that covers the visual field. The allusion to the Russian avant-gardes is inevitable, and the dimension and the form of the visual field, the white monochrome, the placement of the visual filed as object and its industrialness are revisited issues, present in this work by Nuno Sousa. In Iluminante, this idea of dialogue with references from art history and art theory is fundamental, specially those in the field of painting, but its real value lies in its capacity to advance and become autonomous from a merely critical attitude, and proposing another kind of medium. To combine a notion of painting (figurative space) and a notion of architectural fragment (the space for the figure) evokes simultaneously the description and the verb. In the end, this is not a painting, nor just an installation; it is a continuous performance, where the light (action, subject and object) projected on a determined area of the wall (cave, drawing or mirror) is continuously in search of a constant redefinition of the creation of space – and it is up to us, viewers, to fill in the meaning, amplifying its field of action.