On the occasion of my first group exhibition in 2009, which marked the beginning of my career as an artist, the curator posed as the show’s guiding question: “What moves you?” My immediate answer was “everything that surpasses us.” That answer, written on the wall, open and ambitious, seemed not only to settle my thinking as an artist, which had already been developing for a long time, but to become a defining compass for everything that would follow.

In “Imensurável” — an attempt to trace a panorama of my work to date, moving toward a reflection on my first ten years of practice — that understanding still feels deeply true and revealing. In this sense, the work proposes a conceptual dwelling in that which exceeds the limits of comprehension, that empties our emotional and intellectual vocabulary, that imposes on us, through both brutality and silence, a reflection on our place and scale in the world and in the universe, leading us toward an understanding of our existence that approaches the sublime.

As an artist, I have never felt like a craftsman or a being that produces. And yet, I have also never experienced the contemporary fear of calling myself an artist. I have always understood my practice as a revealing, more than a making. I understand and undertake art as a way of thinking, investigating, and creating through methods, promises, and outcomes that differ from those of science, philosophy, or spirituality, but that constantly draws on them in order to expand them, discuss them, and even deny them, inhabiting the gaps they leave behind.

Art may be something like the dark matter that permeates the universe, still utterly ununderstood by science. We know it exists, but little about its nature. It is invisible, imperceptible, and essential for accounting for the conceptual models developed so far. My practice constantly dwells in that in-between. It does not reside in single disciplines, but in the void between them.

The artist’s work is, therefore, a legacy. It is the possibility of a thought not contained by any other field of human knowledge, and one that reveals itself through the inconsequence of its methods and the demonstration of its failures and limitations. There is no fear of the void. At a historical moment in which our philosophical, political, and scientific models seem to have reached the limits of their own reach, procedures, and ambitions, art does not shy away from confronting and dialoguing with the unknown. On the contrary, it dwells in it with enthusiasm.

My work is, therefore, a celebration of the experience of the tangible, and of how that experience, and only that experience, can bring about an apprehension of the intangible and the immaterial with such rhetorical and poetic eloquence. It is a revelation that takes place through absence, through ellipses, through the space between epistemological characters, and through contemplation of that which is infinite, invisible, hidden, that conceals itself beyond the horizon, and that is, ultimately, immeasurable.

Felippe Moraes

1 DELLACQUA, W. Sem Crise ou Os 4 Opositores, 2009. Available in <http://os4opositores.blogspot.pt/2009/04/da-curadoria.html>. Access in: 25 abr. 2018.