Barriers, Bridges, and Burials: On António Bolota’s Sculpture

(2021)

While the project of art writing is already an impossible task in and of itself – having to translate into language what is intended to exist solely in the visual and spatial realm, constantly running up against language’s inherent limitations to accurately convey what is oftentimes fundamentally unnamable, writing about António Bolota comes with its own additional unique challenges. For one thing, there is a resistance to nominalism in the artist’s project; that is, he prefers not to give his work titles. This resistance to naming, while freeing the work from the burden of meaning, also poses a barrier to the project of signification, of signifying. The writer’s lazy reliance on the name of a work of art – not only as harbinger of meaning, but as common referent – forces them to engage with its thingness instead. Indeed, Bolota’s ultimate destination – no matter the site his individual works occupy – might be said to be a state of namelessness that endows these sculptural interventions with a gravity that transcends language, positing a sort of alternate language that is all Bolota’s own.

            Rather than serving as a traditional retrospective – nearly impossible, given the conditions of site specificity under which Bolota typically executes his sculptures – the exhibition at Culturgest serves as a re-working, a re-presentation of earlier works; in this sense, the works are rendered anew, divorced from their original context – which usually, though not always, inflects their meaning – and oftentimes approaching what we might come to conceive as the Modernist ideal of sculpture embedded in the white cube, while playfully negating that ideality through its blunt interactions with the space’s architecture.

            In this sense, it is useful to have some idea about the origins of these six works and the way in which they’ve been re-configured to haunt the current space.

            In 2011, Bolota was invited to exhibit in the 16^th Bienal de Cerveira in the remote northern Portuguese town of Vila Nova de Cerveira. The exhibition took place inside the Casa Vermelha – though Bolota was more struck with the outside of the building, with its bizarre mishmash of architectural styles, largely windowless, a quasi-medieval tower ensconced amongst its red brick façade, a concrete industrial chimney protruding from its side, while the front columnar structure retains the austerity of early Roman architecture. Bolota’s response to the building was to make it even weirder – to add a blind façade, an additional brick wall that, in a sense, mirrors the building’s rear façade. Visiting on-site or merely regarding the photographic documentation of the project, a cursory glance might allow one to overlook Bolota’s contribution; the whole house is so strange anyway, perhaps that additional brick wall is part of the original construction, one might fathom. Upon closer inspection, however, the wall is just a bit too strange: the red brick appears to be of a different dimension than the brick of the house; the cornice atop is, in a similar vein, similar yet different. Moreover, while the rest of the building’s weirdnesses can be functionally justified, the wall serves no real architectural purpose. It is an act of interference: it serves little human use, other than providing a narrow pathway so that the visitor can move claustrophobically between the sculpture and the house.

            Of course, it would make little sense to re-create such a work verbatim in the context of this, or any other exhibition, for that matter. Instead, Bolota has chosen here to respond to the interior architecture of the Culturgest itself, in what manifests as the exhibition’s first work in the entrance hall. In a similar vein, it might readily go ignored, unfathomed by the casual visitor, perhaps unaccustomed to encountering an artwork before having entered the exhibition space proper. Entering the Culturgest, one follows along the path delineated by a waist-high brick wall, at the end of which has been installed a large T-shaped arched structure extending to the ceiling. Again, it draws our attention to some of the oddities of the space: what are all these brick columns and walls doing interrupting the purity of the cultural institution with its typical white walls and sleek dark-grey floor? Like in Vila Nova de Cerveira, Bolota makes no striving for semblance or consistency in materials – his use of brick in the piece is of a larger, cleaner dimension than the smaller bricks in the original architecture, its burnt umber shade also “clashes.” The act of disruption, subtle until you recognize it, is complete – and it is the very act that welcomes us in to the promise of a very disorienting ride.

            This act of stylistic exacerbation, and the engineering ingenuity with which it is executed, is innate to Bolota’s practice, and has its roots in Bolota’s own early training as an engineer, which, as an artist, he has never completely neglected. That is not to imply that the marvels of Bolota’s work can be chalked up purely to his abilities as a technician. In each one of Bolota’s sculptural works to date, there is an equal intensity in the physicality but also the metaphysicality of the thing, an implicit investigation of thingness being carried out, and oftentimes in the most ironic way. To put it another way, we might say that in all of his sculptures, Bolota evokes the essence of yet another classic engineering marvel: the bridge, connecting our constructed world, with all its foibles, to that unattainable world of ideals that art has constantly tried to attain.

            In works such as the one originally executed in 2006 at Interpress in Lisbon and re-created here, the referent is obvious – the terracotta rooftops of traditional Portuguese architecture. Here, the work has been installed in a narrow room of the exhibition space, elongated across the longest wall as though jutting out from it in a triangular formation that clashes marvelously with the rectangular shape of the room’s lighting on the actual ceiling above. The work seems at first a work of miraculous gravity-defying engineering until midway across, as the rows of terracotta panelings forming the rooftop increase, when small wooden columns are installed beneath to support the structure. Of course anyone with even a vague familiarity with this typical kind of Iberian architecture will immediately recognize it as a roof, though its odd displacement here in the gallery, and in incomplete form, built into the wall that it is supposed to be situated atop of, will perhaps lead one to ponder the nature of exhibitionality; what it is to bring the outside inside, essentially tracing that historical Modernist trajectory in which the Monument became the Sculpture; here, the Monument is supplanted by the Architecture, or at least one architectural referent; the strange staging of a transference of signage, from one place to another, into a no-space that unveils the fact of its naked iterability…

            Crossing, from one side to the other, experiencing the other side of his three-dimensional works is an important part of the Bolota universe. Visitors to the artist’s 2010 exhibition at the Porto outpost of Galeria Quadrado Azul experienced this most dramatically. You enter the space to find a stone wall elevated a few meters off the floor by a supporting beam. The wall goes up to the ceiling and bisects the room; there is no way of getting to the other side of the room other than to crawl under the beam. A frightening experience, as for the second or two it takes to crawl under, you are contending with the knowledge of all that weight above you, the seeming precariousness with which the stones forming the wall have been elevated. Faced with the threat of annihilation, of being crushed (and perhaps the knowledge of those immense Richard Serra sculptures that have also killed people in the past!), you crawl under with this grim resigned irony that the artist has given us, that is indeed part of the gift of the work. Because you have a choice: you either take that chance and see the other side of the sculpture, revealing the secret of its construction, or you just see the one side, and are faced with the, as it were, finished product. Again, we are gifted with this reconfiguration of one of the tropes of Portuguese architecture, this time, one of the traditional walls found in the northern countryside rendered from rudimentary materials: the stones stacked in front, seemingly piled haphazardly, hence their threat – and in back, the wet mud in which they have been embedded. The concrete that holds the entire structure together.