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[20250206]
AS IN HEAVEN, SO ON EARTH by RITA CALDO at GALERIA MUNICIPAL DO PORTO curated by PATRÍCIA COELHO [from 20241026 to 20250303]
[Photos: Dinis Santos/Galeria Municipal do Porto]
As in heaven, so on earth invites us to wander and discover Rita Caldo's visual universe, where different sculptural compositions inhabit a maze-like, strange and magical microcosm. These various characters, who follow their delusions in non-linear narratives, are now presented in an exhibition format, transforming the white cube into a box of dreams.
Her artistic practice explores how space and figuration create an imaginary place. Using hand sewing and small-scale ceramic painting, the artist presents masks, sculptures and other figurative distortions. With references to circus spectacle and the aesthetics of exaggeration, reality is moulded into a comedy of the unconscious. Meticulously crafted, all the works are accompanied by small-format texts written by the artist, which linguistically characterize each piece-creature.
Rita Caldo reflects on the linguistic abyss that exists between the world we know and the one we fantasize about. Perhaps this is why the desire to transcend and find a place of liberation in the cosmos is a constant throughout the exhibition. In works such as the self-sculpture Rita, which mimics the artist, or the body-sculptures Arrozinho, Arrozeiro(s), the duality between original and copy is materialized, representing a body that desires metamorphosis and questions canonical notions of identity.
There are many practices that use the self-portrait as a means of expression, presenting a transfigured, made-up, masked body in order to conceive a persona. We find this experimentation in the universe of Cindy Sherman or Leigh Bowery, whose practices were references for the aesthetic thinking behind this exhibition.
Created from Rita Caldo's visual gestures and the exaggerated use of fabric and color, the spatiality of the exhibition project is translated into a poetics of excess. We momentarily inhabit an undefined space, where we are invited to decipher the celestial symphony with the work Milípede and to contemplate the suspension of the outdoor piece Nas nuvens. The soundscape, created in collaboration with António Feiteira, is a music box that plays continuously, driven by the piece Preciosos.
In this show, the constant duality between a dream-space and an unconscious-place leads us through a scene of vibrant chaos made up of bodies, color and sound, so that in the end we can imagine if it were like this in heaven, as it is on earth.
Rita Caldo was born in Porto in 1998. She holds a degree in sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and is a member of the Coletivo Celestial. By creating different characters and sculptural matter, she reveals a malleable body of work placed between magic and strangeness.
As in heaven, so on earth launches the Galeria Municipal do Porto’s new space. Located on the -1 Floor, in the foyer of the Almeida Garrett Municipal Library Auditorium, this new space presents artists making their institutional debut offering a place for experimentation, expanding Galeria Municipal do Porto’s capacity to embrace and promote the diversity of practices that make up the city’s art scene.
>>> Exhibition booklet
[Text: Patrícia Coelho]
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