Reflexivity is the title of the art exhibition at the Guarda Museum that showcases some of the work done by Martim Brion between 2018 and 2024. The exhibition, of which the artist is also the curator, was designed to celebrate freedom of thought, creation, and expression, thus evokes half a century of democracy in Portugal.
The issue of reflexivity seems to be part of the debate that A. Giddens’ (1991) thesis of “reflexive modernity” has been stirring up in the social sciences of the present day. Between social, institutional and individual reflexivity, self-reflective practices are multiplying and have become fundamental to building sustainable development and resilience in societies around the world: becoming aware of problems, critically analysing them, taking stock, making an action plan and implementing it are the phases of a process that shapes modern lifestyles. Spaces of opportunity and crisis scenarios are managed on a continuous basis, and efforts are made to find solutions that best suit each specific situation.
Suggesting a scenario that exemplifies the problems outlined above, the exhibition is part of a very open and fluid aesthetic that defines Brion’s minimalist universe, combining abstraction, elementary geometric shapes and volumes, standardised materials with smooth and shiny surfaces, intense colours, photographs taken with a mobile phone and an incessant search for harmony. At first glance, what you see is only what is shown: it doesn’t represent, it doesn’t signify, it doesn’t subjectivise. It establishes an art of the essential, purely mental, without pathos or plot. The material each work is made of and its shape and colour(s) not only reinforce the notion of emotional detachment, but also constitute the very reality of the place they inhabit. However, on closer inspection, it’s important to note that most of the works’ subtitles refer not only to the lexical field of Physics and Industry (component, receptacle, repetition, grid lines, perspectives, positive and negative…), but also to titles that bear the name of the work. ), but also to titles with cultural and symbolic references, such as political practices and books on literature and philosophy, like “Censorship series”, “Point Counter Point series”, referring to Aldous Huxley’s novel, published in 1930, and “Dark Times series”, alluding to Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times, published in 1968. In this way, we are alerted to the danger of extremism, as the history of totalitarianism in the 20th century teaches us.
Martim Brion’s work combines abstract photography, three-dimensional works (fusing painting and sculpture), a series of plastic elements, text (in English), and ecphrastic discourse as means of communication both through silence and interpellation, focusing on operationalisation devices in space that appeal to the self-reflexive dimension in artistic production and in understanding the world today. It questions obvious themes and associations such as the universal vs. the individual, thought vs. emotion, inventiveness vs. the artistic gesture, information technology vs. intuition, the political regime vs. personal freedom and everyday life vs. human nature. The viewer is thus led, not without a sense of humour, to ask themselves: is this art? What skills does the artist mobilise? What does this tell me? Is it worth it for the idea or the object? A surprise effect or one I’ve seen before? It’s up to the viewer to meditate, decide, and assign it a status – art, non-art or anti-art – based on their experiences of living with art and their knowledge of it, thus enabling them to sharpen a critical and emancipatory awareness in opposition to the growing hyper-technologisation of life. The artist’s discourse on the exhibition’s room sheet points in this direction, establishing his lines of thought that guide the visitor’s interpretation.
Like a designer or architect, Martim Brion recomposes a given space with volumes, proportions, geometry, symmetry, perspectives, and rhythms according to the principle of seriation, repetition, or variation. He explores spatial relationships and the ability of abstract sculpture, the suggestive image of simple forms, and the text integrated into the visual arts to interact with the surrounding space, focusing on the visual experience, the movement of the body, and the viewer’s own critical sense. Aiming for deliberately cold and neutral sophistication, it seeks the perfect balance between matter and emptiness so that each artistic object on display becomes part of the space, affirming its presence in it without overpowering or contesting it. In this way, the viewer can be open to a new relationship with each of them.
In this sense, it should come as no surprise that Martim Brion’s practice focuses on the perception of objects in their relationship with space. His works reveal their surroundings as determining elements. Perhaps for this reason, the artist aims to create a controlled and totalising environment in the exhibition, leaving the visitor in an original place outside of space-time. This atmosphere gives the viewer the chance to reflect on the relationship between the 17th century granite building (a former seminary built in the 17th century) adapted into a museum space and the colourful objects, reminiscent of “lego” or “meccano” sets, made from industrial materials, such as polyurethane paint, iron, aluminium, photographic paper, PVC, MDF and acrylic, and the texts which, on the one hand, illustrate the process of the creative, critical and selective act, and, on the other, exemplify the idea behind the plastically materialised theme of censorship (‘Censorship series’). In this approach, which is as analytical as it is playful, the languages mobilised suggest a redefinition of space, the abolition of time, the possibility of reinvention, innovation and overcoming in the contemporary world, despite its crises, fractures and disillusionment.
The three-dimensional work, entitled “Constituent II”, is both an inaugural piece and a key to deciphering the body of work gathered, installed in the gallery and dealing with issues such as polychrome sculpture, abstract photography and texts referring to works of art, artistic processes or illustrative themes. The whole will challenge the viewer to rehearse constructions of meanings for these pieces and series and, at the same time, their connections with reflexivity in the contemporary world.
The gallery walls, here, display a set of four colour gradations – yellow, pink, blue and green – always starting with black, in rectangular aluminium tubes (therapeutic repetitions?), over there a series of strongly coloured cubic volumes, slightly inclined, simulating fitted components, there two compositions with tube sections, sometimes straight and sometimes bent. There are sequences of images with frames, others without, in different formats, and also coloured backgrounds with partially or completely erased text; the alternation of image and text is played with and the typography is presented as an image. There are photos that look like visual poems (pieces from a visual diary that the artist has been cultivating), texts that appear to be images, images that ask for words, and speeches that question the creative process.
As a curiosity, still on the subject of combining iconic and verbal elements, there is also no shortage of allusions to the History of Art, as suggested in the text in front of me. A text with a lilac background and red letters, which talks about a flag:
“Extended boxes of different colours, red, white, pink, blue and black. / That’s that! / He calls it a flag.” [‘Descriptions 4 #1 of 3’]
This statement seems to refer to the episode in which Frank Stella, one of the fathers of minimalism, was deeply affected by Jaspers Johns’ painting of flags, exhibited for the first time in 1958 at the Castelli Gallery in New York.
The exhibition culminates provocatively with the large-format digital image depicting a marble square slightly in perspective, which has been given the name ‘Kontrasquare’, a neologism with a cartoonish function that links a German term with an English one – and which seems to symbolise the fixed mentality, resistant to change and other points of view, of so-called square minded.
Martim Brion’s informed reflection is thus subtle and ironic, because he has made it his own, being himself, and on which he leaves in this exhibition clues that lead the viewer to see – to understand in each new artistic manifestation or recombination of series already shown in other exhibition spaces – a new sign, that is, a new reflection. Which makes this exhibition something sophisticatedly new, likely to intrigue the visitor and lead them to refute preconceptions. In this sequence of objects and images, shapes and colours, words and attitudes, all questions and possibilities circulate. Each piece is a question of values. Values that, being based on individual freedom, mutual respect and dialogue, as well as emotional well-being, access to knowledge of the world, and a critical sense, derive from the aesthetic pleasure in a democratic society and the sense of life today that Martim Brion’s work also represents.
Thiery Santos, Guarda, 2024
Martim Brion 