SINTRA MUSEU DE ARTE MODERNA COLECCAO BERARDO/PALACIO NACIONAL DA PENA/PARQUE DA PENA.

RUI CHAFES

Sintra, on the outskirts of Lisbon, is known as a magical place--or at least a place with a romantic atmosphere. Here, Rui Chafes's sculpture was displayed in three quite different spaces: one outside a traditional museum space, the Coleccao Berardo, which houses a collection of twentieth-century art; outdoors, as well, at the Parque da Pena, an enormous garden with ponds and man-made grottoes where the sculptures were placed in direct relation to the landscape's natural and artificial elements alike; and, finally, the interior spaces of the Palacio da Pena, created (as was the park) in the second half of the nineteenth century by a prince consort of German origin, married to Maria II of Portugal and an enthusiast of romantic and esoteric ideas. The palace has kept its furnishings and decor, thus creating a highly suggestive atmosphere.

Nearly half of the forty-six works on view were created specially for this exhibition. As usual with Chafes, all the sculptures were made of iron and painted black or metallic gray. Some were sited directly in the landscape; others hung from crenels or windows, whether outside the palace or in a small structure in the middle of a lake, carrying on a dialogue with the architecture and the sky, competing with the stars. Inside the palace, the placement of the sculptures varied in response to the diverse characteristics of the rooms. Thus, in the queen's dressing room was a pair of iron shoes, impossible to wear, for diminutive feet--as if for a ghost trying to return to life. In the halls, rooms, and recesses of the palace were placed sober, imposing, human-scale abstract sculptures; their titles identified them as portraits, among them Georg Buchner's characters Woyzeck and Lenz as well as Moosbtugger from Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities-madmen from Germanic literature, introduced into real space.

Aura, 2000, serves as a synthesis of Chafes's poetic goals: a pair of eagle's wings, cut and soldered in iron, hanging from a column in the kitchen, amid the pots and pans in the middle of a table. The work reminds us that the artist has long since fallen from the heights of romantic or even modernist myth. He fell precisely into the middle of the world, into the most plebeian of locales, the kitchen, that site of the most humble tasks. But there his wings can rest, mere objects among others. Even so, when we look at them attentively and affectionately, we may perhaps sense the memory of soaring flights and reflections of the most intense light: in other words, what the German Romantics called poetry.

This exhibition forced us to think in unaccustomed ways about the place of sculpture in today's world: a political place, a physical place, and a poetic place. Chafes's sculptures can no longer serve the function of political glorification, which tradition assigned to the monument. Nor do they aspire to be rigorous formal exercises in the physical occupation of a neutral space. They are the stubborn remains and recollection of art as transcendence and utopia. Against the dominant strategies of speed and noise, Rui Chafes takes a stand based on slowness and silence.