Forma Primeira
2025
Light floods the space, dissolving its materiality. It illuminates three large metal panels, suspended from the ceiling, that form a reflection system. A text is composed on these shiny surfaces, based on a collection of timeless inscriptions, drawings and symbols. We receive an indisputable message, imbued with a telluric aura: someone has passed this way. Sound summons another time. Through it we can hear the vibrant matter that unites the before and after of all things. It is Francisco Pedro Oliveira’s heart talking to the Earth. In this liminal space, between abstraction and materiality, the artist challenges us to activate our other senses, in order to enter the exhibition as a synaesthetic experience and invites us to see ourselves from the outside, transcending our own existence.
In Forma Primeira, Francisco Pedro Oliveira presents an exercise in sensory spatialisation, in which core questions of a plastic, philosophical and spiritual nature converge with matter, language and human perception. The installation features different material expressions, such as light, minerals and sound, which together articulate the artist’s ecosystem of interests: Portuguese ethnography, apotropaic phenomena, vernacular knowledge and syncretistic notions of spirituality. In Pedro Oliveira’s words, the works presented at the Galeria Municipal refer to “a body of work that establishes a link between the concepts of spirituality and materiality through an artistic practice that aims to access a fundamental human matrix”.The artist’s work explores the spiritual and earthly planes through flows of time and matter, materialised in people and elements.
Accepting that the sacred is present in all things, there is the possibility of exploring other ways of relating to what transcends us, whether through faith, art or language. Historically, the concept of Primal Form – the “immediate manifestation of divinity” (Eliade, 1987). – was associated with meteorite falls. The phenomenon was interpreted as a spiritual event that brought parts of heaven down to earth. The first iron manipulated by human hands was extracted from these celestial projectiles, a gesture that establishes an alchemical relationship between metallurgy and spirituality.
The oldest term for iron is the Sumerian word AN-BAR, the result of the combination of “sky” and “fire”. This hybrid character of the raw material made into a word connects with humanity through metallurgical work. Similarly, in Primal Form the association between spirituality and materiality is articulated through the constant exploration of the limits of the material.
Pedro Oliveira terms this a collaborative process, in the course of which he experiments with a structural understanding, analysing the interdependent relationships between the elements (water, fire, air, earth), the passage of time, and his own hands.
In Primal Form, in particular in the three suspended metal sculptures, Pedro Oliveira explores the conviction that all matter has its own latent state. Through the passage of time and the manipulation of temperature, he activates iron’s physical properties to inscribe a diverse collection of symbols, characters and images. In this way, the sculptures acquire a holistic and magical dimension, synthesising the living omnipresence of metals and the connection with the sacred made possible by human action. Metal also functions as a diffuser of light, the central element of the exhibition, illuminating the relationship between all the elements in the space, while dissolving boundaries between ideas such as spiritual and the terrestrial, the sacred and the profane, the immaterial and the material, a move that reinforces the understanding of the inherent equilibrium of co-dependence between all things.
Finally, it is on the basis of sound, enveloping and passing through all things, that we access an interstitial landscape. A timeless, easily recognisable sound that leads us back to the earth, to the womb, to the beginning of everything, to the first fragments of the sky that human beings once held in their hands.
Isabeli Santiago
Ficha técnica:
FORMA PRIMEIRA, 2025 [instalação]
Impermanência, 2025
Vidro, metal, driver de pressão,
som digital. Dimensões Variáveis
Olho Gordo, 2025
Painéis de Inox, cabo de aço.
300 x 100 cm [x3]
Créditos:
Fotografias: Dinis Santos @ Galeira Municipal do Porto