Daniel Blaufuks
Attempting Exhaustion
November 26, 2016–January 14, 2017
Exhibition and new space opening: Friday, November 25, 10pm
Galeria Vera Cortês
Rua João Saraiva 16, 1st Alvalade
1700–250 Lisbon
Portugal
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 2–7pm
T +351 213 950 177
www.veracortes.com
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Galeria Vera Cortês is a Lisbon-based art gallery founded in 2006. After ten years of being housed in a 19th-century riverfront apartment in Santos, the gallery is expanding and relocating to a new space in Alvalade, Lisbon’s quintessential 1940s and 50s modernist district. Departing from the typology of the gallery-as-apartment into the gallery-as-warehouse, Vera Cortês remains committed to the quality of its programme and to pushing forward the boundaries of what a gallery is in our time. In a fortunate coincidence with the 2006 opening of its first space with a solo show by Daniel Blaufuks, the new premises in Alvalade will also open with a show by the same artist and with a project specifically developed with the new exhibition space in mind.
Daniel Blaufuks
Attempting Exhaustion
Between Friday, October 18 and Sunday, October 20, 1974, the writer Georges Perec sat daily in a café at Place Saint-Sulpice, in Paris, thoroughly documenting what he saw, charting brief details of buses and people, dogs, funeral processions, and all he ate and drank. These notes of “that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather” are the material for the book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, a work focused on the infra-ordinary with obvious links to contemporary photography.
Between 2009 and 2016, I photographed a table and a window in my kitchen in Lisbon. I was first attracted by its silence, later by how the objects received the light, and, finally, by their geometrical composition. I couldn’t help noticing, more and more, how things repeated themselves without truly repeating themselves. Little changes, almost invisible transformations happened every day, according to weather and season. Unlike Perec’s tableau, as he saw it from the Café Tabac in Paris, mine was truly void of any action. In front of those luminous but opaque windows, the objects on the table were replaced in function of everyday needs: dishes, glasses, newspapers, magazines, flowers, napkins, the fruit in season, papers, instruments, maps. Retreating from the outside world, I slowly transformed my kitchen into a refuge, a shelter, a place for introspection and solace. Sometimes, I could see the suspended light as a modest reminder of the light in a church or mosque I once visited in Iran. Everything seemed to remain unchanged in this kitchen while the world outside transformed. A friend died, a government collapsed, a book came out, a war flared, a bomb exploded. One day the world attempted to break in: a constructor knocked on my door and told me the owner of the house wanted to replace the window; that I would feel much happier with a modern window with larger glass panes, more luminous and better insulated. He was still talking when I shut the door on his face. I kept on photographing, started experimenting with other devices, getting different results. Color, black and white, negative, positive, digital, film, instant film. Somewhere, I found an old photo of my refugee great-grandparents sitting on a different table, facing a similar window. Yes, it was the same light, and also they had bathed in it. (…)
Daniel Blaufuks, October 2016
