Rui Calçada Bastos was the first artist to conceive a work specifically to be diffused via e-mail by EMPTY CUBE. This digital format piece is based on a 30 x 30 cm original on paper, with a print run of thirty copies and two artist’s proofs.

Technical Room
With Untitled 2011, Calçada Bastos answers a specific question: how to depict, by means of a single image, a certain context, here the EMPTY CUBE project and its variables, such as the cubic space (with a square ground plan) or its experimental, transitory slant. The picture, a square made up of small coloured squares – evocative of a mosaic-lined wall – bears in its centre the following text, in white letters on a red background: ‘Sala técnica’ [Technical room].
The myriad of tiny squares indicates a fragmentary logic that casts our gaze adrift on the surface of the photographed object, as if we were scrutinising that skin which embodies the photographed subject as a possibility of depicting what that record may become, as an image transfixed by a poetic act that intends to enunciate and project another instance of reality.
In other words: the use of metaphor, apparently inscribed in the centre of the image (the reference to a technical room where tunings and corrections are carried out, experiments take place and working processes are developed), is actually materialised in each fragment, which replicates itself formally while expanding itself infinitely, as some kind of net or visual anechoic chamber, over which the gaze lingers, repositioning itself on the referential or semiologic inscription at the centre.

João Silvério
May 2012

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