Pedro Cabrita Reis: Il Palazzo Vuoto

Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis (b.1956, Lisbon) returns at Giorgio Persano Gallery with a new project called Il palazzo vuoto.

This impressive work consists of more than nine tons of steel, a succession of beams, an inside/outside closer to a concept of building as anthropological or philosophical experience implying an awareness of the individual, rather than one of architecture considered by the artist as a sociological process able to create spaces of cohabitation which, as ultimate goal, aim to soften any social comparison.
Il palazzo vuoto materialises this striving for a place of identity.

As always, Cabrita Reis‘s work embraces a wide variety of media: painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, brought into use in combination with industrial materials and by recycling old artefacts. The objects are thus transported and re-assembled and so subjected to new construction processes, acquiring renewed meanings while maintaining reminiscences of almost anonymous everyday gestures and actions.
The large iron sculpture is accompanied by other works by the artist who, of course, also works with neon, concerning which it is worth recalling the recent, important project, A Remote Whisper, for the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. This exhibition presents the enigmatic La settima luce in alto (The seventh light up): 150 fluorescent lights, of which only one is switched on.
The artist, who has repeatedly claimed to be a painter who makes sculpture, has chosen on this occasion to present a number of his latest paintings, acrylic works on a linen canvas.

The works of Pedro Cabrita Reis are charged with the suggestive power of associations and, going beyond the visual field, reach a metaphorical dimension, becoming spiritual and contemplative places, finally assigned to silence.