After all the video/cinematographic works in this exhibition have been seen, one may ask what is, in abstract terms, the best approach for one to draw up a critical essay upon the art in the hypercultural world in which we live. These films project a sort of revenge against everything that has modified the weight and significance of art, suggesting a great many responses to this questioning. We still do not know exactly what the sequence of events was: whether it was the many confrontations within the field of art, which is increasingly given greater value and turned into a fundamental part of the market, that led to the extraordinary development of its economic aspect or whether, on the contrary, it was, due to it being more and more politicized, that it voluntarily joined the established mercantile order, becoming a nuclear element in a veritable transnational cultural economy. However, the solution to this doubt turns out to be inconsequential, given that the factors in the setup are not organized chronologically, and because capitalism has always been able to neutralise the symbolic frontiers that provide hierarchies between high and low cultures, art and commerce, the spirit and enjoyment.

Gabriel Abrantes’ works appear at a moment when we may feel tempted to acritically accept non-conformist discourse as being worn out and out of step, absorbed by the governing logics of the system in exact proportion to its radical nature. Abrantes’ discourse possesses enormous mobility and disengagement on all levels, forming an incessant attempt to seek identity among particularities and shows a demand, almost an urgency, to survive in a global world that has necessarily and with neither defined nor constant direction altered the relationships between culture and politics. The disorientation one feels when faced with the dizzying speed of the changes in the world places us before a threat of the collapse of our defining references. Given that it is not impermeable to these phenomena, art stops having a subordinate role in regard to the social relationships of production and consumption. There is a strong politicization of the economy and a minimum degree of commitment in its relationships with the State. Today, thanks to the pressures provoked by the increase of particularist claims, as well as by the Dynamics associated to individualism, culture has become a central cause of conflict and a new factor of division. The affronts can be seen not only in the cultural and economic spheres, confirming an extensive mechanism of social fragmentation accompanied by the imperative to acknowledge diversity in the public space and by problematic as to collective morality. The affirmation of the identity rights of minorities, new types of sociability, new civilisational discontent, destructuring of personalities, fragilisation and intrapsychic conflicts are drawing out new fractures and making new points of thermodynamic tension that go far beyond the religious and have to do with the cultural domain as a whole, although they are characterized by the intrinsically partial and fragmentary nature of their creations, thus hindering a comprehensive world view of the contemporary condition.

In a period defined by the absence of counter-models – all the models are parallel and not competitive – the question appears as to how one can produce a critique of the constant redefining, restructuring and invasions by the logic of contesting and competing that determines the obtaining of results and which has been imposed as the exclusive standard for our social universe. According to the romantic ideal, artists were admired because of their talents and capacity for making, being considered to be the opposite of any established regime. Now they are seen as individuals who do not have any reservations about their activities being included in the ruling economic structures.

The images contained in Gabriel Abrantes’ videos condense a clash between the banal nature of the discourse and the gravity of the gesture and of behaviour – reflections of a desire for ascending and transcending, betrayed at the end by a failure of principles and morality. Anyone who observes them becomes part of a game of apologetic representations of redemption, coming close to a sacred and subliminal idealisation of what is to come in art, reinitiating a search for values and learning that reality seems to wish to deny. One senses an announced catastrophe – an imminent event, a beginning/end that will lead people to feel close to a moment that is impossible to control in its future consequences.
The dialogues support and guide the characters who, not definitively belonging to the place in which they are, appear as stripped of meaning, and the words do not individually compromise the person who utters them. Each character makes use of a universal text, thus surviving within a situation of imminent disaster. For this reason the word takes on a prophetic and sacred charge in its significations – as if, through the development of the particular, any creation could achieve a universalist dimension.

The happiness that everyone aims at supposes a wonderful trust in Man’s perfection, in his eagerness to free himself from the eternal repetition of unhappiness, in his quest for a new, better world. This state of apparent hope is based on a dual rejection of salvation and of the sublime, and chooses an idea of happiness – we prefer to be happy to being sublime or saved. In the arguments used there is a semantic imponderability resulting from the fragmentation and superimposition of the discourses into loose, ambivalent parts, expressed in a calculated structure of foreseeing and anticipating the disaster thought of as the other tumultuous and almost sacrificial side of progress. We detect these movements of detachment and of the triumph of comfort in the transfiguration of the narratives, in a body transformed into our faithful receptacle on earth, which needs to be treated, wrapped up and looked after when its salvation forces submission to the divine, to its scorn and to oblivion. Bodily pains are not consolations for the beyond, but rather a condition in the improving of the world. The idea of progress overcomes eternity, and the future cannot be the ultimate refuge of hope – the era of reconciliation among men. Since the Renaissance the way we perceive existence has changed, and despite material and technical development the world continues to not have a place – a fertile garden in which we may feel a kindly gaze and allow the rehabilitation of instinct as a conquest of the pleasant. In losing the objective relationship of the point from which they started, the characters and those observed appear crude and clean, and the setting seem to be proposals in which just action will always be associated to pleasure and unjust action to suffering. The actors, who come from all over the planet, are images with no theatrical preparation in an instant time and space, full of events and historical references, which leads us to wonder about the global encounter or lack of encounter in which all the present stories take place. This ambiguity results in the sensation that we find ourselves in an open or closed space, without our being subjected to concerns and rationalisations about our socio- geographical relationship and in confrontation with our cultural origins and roots. The landscapes are an important link to a geography about to be contaminated by a consumer and stateless desire that stands out in the degraded forms of construction, alien to the work of Man. The set of actions that make up these works points towards a persistent and unsolvable discrepancy, shown in the most unusual of our acts and in the insidious strength of peripheral poverty. We are going through a time of existential impotence, imprisoned in an overpopulated territory and subjected to the impossibility of escaping from the happiness of well-being without choice determined by an overpowering and runaway capitalist system based on development and progress. Thus one makes a cinema that reveals a world in extinction/ alteration, about which one glimpses at a ritualistic human life in the preparation of a final and founding event that for this very reason will always be a tragic/sacred moment.

This exhibition by Gabriel Abrantes ends a cycle of five years of activity in the field of contemporary art at the Vila Flor Cultural Centre. In choosing this artist we wished to emphasise artistic creativity through the presentation of supports possessing a high degree of non-material nature, such as video, accompanied by studies and plans of the works exhibited. This aim may be considered to be the culmination of a course, which was from the outset concerned about diversifying the approaches to and contexts of creation. In considering the strong representative charge inherent to the idea of the end of a cycle, out of which several different interpretations may emerge; it was also our intention to show the work of an artist who is precisely in a counter-cycle due to the fact that he is at the beginning of his career. His work is largely defined by primordial pulsating and energy in which we clearly acknowledge an initiatory character and a will to present himself to the world – a stance with which we can identify and which, despite the symbolism of the date, we do not wish to end here.