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11/01/2007: "Doubts, Questions & Certainties [continued...]" by Jose Freitas Cruz
If September started out full of promise, October turned out to be a call back to reality. Too many plans failed to live up to the expectations I had built up over the summer. But when I think about this past month I don’t necessarily see defeat, doubts were cast aside and questions were answered even if they came the hard way.I had given-in to Fernando’s enthusiasm. I had pledged not to, but by early September I found myself filling in an application form for another biennial and handing over two large paintings. Fernando got his rejection letter first, mine arrived two days later, we both decided to delay retrieving our work until the exhibition was running and we could catch a glimpse of the show in one single trip.
In the meantime we focused on our [OD] group show at the Medical Doctors’ Guild in Lisbon set for the first week of October. The motivation behind this one was that they have a gallery to sponsor the arts and we were on a high to have been fitted in to their calendar – the medical class seemed like an appealing niche to target and the gallery lady’s talk sounded promising.
It must have been the arrangement of the celestial bodies. The opening of our show was on the same week as the biennial and there can be no denying that the forces weren’t willing to play in our favour either way. I’m not overly knowledgeable concerning things astrological though I do believe that the positioning of planets and stars affects things around these parts.Now, one could say that our misfortune was due to our lack of experience or commitment but I can assure you that this was not the case. In the first situation, yes, maybe: we chose our paintings unwisely – rather, we submitted our work unwisely – but I’ll leave that for later. In the second, however, we covered more than the angles we artists had agreed to cover in exchange for 40% of sales, but to no avail, because as we would find out at our own expense there really wasn’t a gallery to speak of beyond the walls that carried our paintings.
Fernando had submitted all materials for promotion purposes two months ahead of the show and the gallery had agreed to our own design for the invitation and posters they would send out. Early September things still seemed to be running smoothly. The first signs of danger arrived around the time we got those rejection letters. The planets, the stars!
1 – Our proposed opening date and time was changed to a Monday night [22.00h] which was more suited to the doctors’ busy schedules, so the gallery claimed. We couldn’t really argue, could we, it was her word against our gut-feeling.
2 – The gallery could only hand us invitations [for family and friends] five days [Thursday?!] before the opening and the medical class would be notified through internal memos and the ‘usual means’ of publicity, whatever that meant. Our gut-feelings were twitching and turning by now.
Clearly, these were not good omens. On the spot Rui, Fernando and I decided to send a digital image of the invitation via e-mail to all our acquaintances to be on the safe side. We still remained starry-eyed in our belief that the bulk of visitors would be the said medical doctors. We were still in September, the celestial bodies were still moving into position, we still harboured hope.The second onslaught of unexpected changes came when we made arrangements to leave our work at the gallery a day or two before the show and discuss with the gallery lady where to place which paintings and how. We had printed-out a detailed plan after several visits to facilitate things. In this way all we had to do on the opening day would be to double-check for minor details and set the lighting appropriately.
So, then came 3:
3 – We were only allowed access to the gallery Monday morning [11.am]… at which point we also discovered we would have to bring down the previous artist’s work because the gallerist was too busy and the artist could only come later in the afternoon!
Fernando and I [Rui had his Monday students to tend to] unloaded our 30 some paintings, cleared the walls, set-up the show, adjusted the lighting and left a pen-drive with the final alterations to the price-list for the gallerist to print out while we headed home for a short rest and quick meal before returning for the opening. All in all, the gallerist helped us hang two paintings… and the artist who’d gone before us was still retrieving her work when we walked out the door at 7.00 pm! We walked away with a sense that we had left behind one hell of a show.4. 5. 6. 7… would be far too many to mention. By this time the planets and stars were firmly fixed into place and if anything else had to go wrong it would… and did. The gallerist actually managed to mess-up the information we had left on the pen-drive claiming it carried a virus; not one single doctor or administrative personnel from the guild showed up; and to top things off, one hour into the show we discovered that the gallerist had gone home… but the list could go on. Talk about a screw-up. At around midnight we decided to call it a day and headed back home, but as we walked away we still felt we had left behind a great show. We had kept our part of the deal.
None of us is quite sure yet what all that was about but we are unanimous in the certainty we extracted from the experience: in the end we were glad we didn’t sell one single piece. We certainly had mixed feelings about that, but ultimately it felt better that way – had we sold something we’d have been forced to hand over 40%, and after everything that transpired I think we would have been sick to our stomachs.
Once that was over, after the two weeks the show was up and we’d taken the paintings back to the studio, Fernando and I decided to check out the biennial and rescue the last remaining paintings we had left ‘orphaned’ and rejected in the big wide world. By this time the stellar and planetary bodies had shifted somewhat and we left Lisbon in a more cheerful mood.
We’d be collecting our work in Coruche, in the Ribatejo region, and heading deeper into the Alentejo to see and bring home a show Fernando had inaugurated in the meantime. A busy man, Fernando, he’s been doing a string of solo exhibitions throughout the Alentejo against the tide of economic recession and the effect that has on the disinterest of the local populations. He has yet to see a return on all his investment and effort and I have to admire his perseverance.
You’d be inclined to ask, what’s the point? He sometimes feels the same way and asks me if there is a point. I think there is and I tell him so. He’s got strong ties to the place, it would be wrong to concentrate only on the city-folk, or advance more intently in the city without having given ‘his people’ a chance to see his ‘Alentejo Series’. He is giving them that chance, whether they go see it or not is their business, but no one will be able to accuse him in the future of having neglected the periphery as is so often claimed in this small country of ours.
I wouldn’t do it, but that’s a different matter altogether, I haven’t got the same ties to the region, or any region for that matter, but that is another story.
It was a sunny day as we headed out of Lisbon across the bridge over the Tagus, our spirits were high even though we were going to check out a show we hadn’t been selected for. We had been unwise in our choice of paintings to submit to the show, our work really did not fit in with the general curatorial philosophy, or lack of it. We failed to do our home-work correctly and learn something more about the curators and the credibility they could bring in to the project before deciding to submit our applications. You are absolutely right to believe that deep inside each one of us was secretly looking for arguments to minimise the ‘damage’, but I know this: we were both happy and relieved to drive onwards feeling unscathed. I’ve wiped away traces of better participations than this from my exhibition history. Sometimes, just sometimes, you’re better off not having appeared somewhere.
Our drive took us to lunch in Portalegre where Fernando collected his show and then all the way to the castle of Marvão overlooking Spain. From the top it felt as if we could get a clearer view of everything. I took my camera and captured a few moments you can catch bits of in the new video I’ve uploaded together with this blog. Maybe the planets had been kind all along but I just hadn’t been able to see it.
