H. Suite (XII)

TRAVELLING MACHINEThe boxes turned into tables that support glass with domes on them are machines, connected by cables. They are, as Joseph Beuys used to say, batteries. In the case of Pedro Cabrita Reis, they are machines powered by an energy that seems to come from a deep, Portuguese and vernacular zone, connected to a memory of some lost time between the vague past and their present. Pedro Cabrita Reis has that strange capacity to turn us into the activators of a device for moving in time – his works are time machines, vernacular in their fragility. It is in the counterpoising of elements we recognise – devices that belong to an archaeology of memory and the permanent connection to the idea of construction, of edification – that these sculptures find their specific, efficient power. This work was a commission from the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos and is connected to other works that Cabrita Reis made at the same time, namely as an extraordinary installation that he made for the town of Óbidos. This monumental work was entitled Das mãos dos construtores (1992) and was made up of immense pipelines that led to and came out in sober, enclosed brick dwellings. At the same time he made a set of sculptures entitled H. suits, which added to his work a hospital component which was intimately linked to the body, one that was tragic in the frailty that defined an anthropological view of illness, of perishability and of healing. It is in the coming together of this universe that this sculpture appears, as close to the scale of the body as a piece of furniture, yet turned into a monument. Sometimes Pedro Cabrita Reis’s work takes this monumental scale to an architectural level and the sculpture becomes a building. In none of these cases is it ever the space as such that his work deals with, but our relationship with it, even when his proposal – in which there is a crossing of romantic memory, the nostalgia of rationalist humanism, the archaeology of a pre-artistic thought and sleight of hand – takes the model of the cathedral or its opposite, the buckle, as its base matrix. Here, however, it is the slightly amplified human scale of the body that makes this obsolete machine, this battery that can only be believed under electric light, live.Delfim Sardo