Doris von Drathen
Few artists are able to reduce video to its essential means
of expression. Rui Calçada Bastos goes further, using video and its possibilities
in a similar way to pencil drawing. With a minimum of technical effects he creates
a lively iconography, which does not simply unfold itself on the screen, but
uses the screen as its starting point.
Quadrifoglio assembles four short black-and-white scenes. Though independent
from each other, they seem as a whole to deal with a common topic. The protagonist
is always the artist himself. A man runs across a park, approaching the spectator,
then trips and falls down. He slowly gets up, clutching his apparently sore
knee, then drags himself onto a bench. As he recovers, his figure slowly starts
to detach from its contours, giving birth to a body double. The twin figure
turns around to face the man on the bench, and looks at him in amazement before
returning into the body, thus reconstituting an entity. Calçada Bastos
uses the simplest means to illustrate a mental capacity familiar to everyone,
which Valéry described in the following terms: "Les hommes sont
faits d’une maison et d’une abeille." ["Men are made of
a house and a bee."] (1) We have the capacity of stepping out of our bodies
and contemplating ourselves from the outside. Indeed, we live at once inside
and outside.
This split, this mirror effect, is precisely what defines our human condition.
Calçada Bastos actually uses superimposition as an iconologic vehicle
rather than a mere playful element. Consequently, all his images are consistent
and meaningful. A man climbs a staircase, takes a key from his pocket –
an object we carry concealed in our pockets, only brought to the fore to be
used as a connecting device between the inside and outside – opens an
apartment door, walks in, locks the door and peers through the spyhole at the
space outside, from where he just came. Is he afraid of a stalker? The rhythm
of the sequence does not suggest it. Placidly, quietly, the man looks back;
a change of perspective, as though he were retrospectively observing himself
crossing a timespace. The light from outside casts a bright spot in his eye.
In another sequence the outside becomes a person, it turns into the Other, "qui
déborde la capacité du Moi" ["which exceeds the capacity
of the I"]. (2)
Everyone is the Other. Again, Rui Calçada Bastos demonstrates this through
simple techniques. A man stands in an empty, dim apartment, with his back to
the eye of the camera. Light shines through a crack in the door, pouring onto
the floor. A sheet of paper crosses the light beams. While the man bends down,
a woman’s hand, barely distinguishable from his own, picks up the letter.
Shifting between his and her hand, the letter is opened and slowly unfolds,
revealing a luminous white sheet filling the entire screen, which is eventually
replaced by a shot of a woman's back in a girded blouse. The woman, in turn,
stands at the window with her back to the camera. Both protagonists' backs recall
the silent white sheet of paper and the shut door between them, which spectators
instinctively sense.
In the fourth and final sequence, the outside takes an unexpected turn. Similar
to a Piranesi etching, images of a moving elevator fuse into a labyrinth combining
inside and outside, above and below. While the camera adopts the perspective
of the man entering the lift – focussing on the grid bars as they cross
the grid of the elevator shaft, progressively densifying to complete opacity
– it also scans the outside of both the shaft and the lift, accompanying
its progression from one floor to the next, exploring the railings, following
the vertical metal beams on which the cabin climbs, rising higher and higher
until it becomes apparent that the house has in fact no roof. A bright white
void sets in, swallowing the elevator and its image. Here, the threshold of
everyday life is crossed.
The outside has turned into something transcendental, something no longer fathomable,
something the artist is hinting at in a deliberately undramatic, unsophisticated
way, as being the part lying beyond our boundaries. Here lies Rui Calçada
Bastos' art: rather than staging the other side, he draws it inside the mind
of the viewer.
Notes:
(1) Paul Valéry, Eupalinos ou l'Architecte, Paris, 1923.
(2) Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l'extériorité,
Paris, 1961.
