Inês Teles: Aliquid stat pro aliquo

Inês Teles’ work (Évora – Portugal, 1986) develops from the investigation of two of the fundamental dimensions of painting: matter and perception. It happens in a continuous movement, from which one work comes after the other, to highlight the research findings that show up through the plastic and the formal appearance of the “final” piece of art. Therefore, Teles’ work is an unpredictable endless stream that breaks down into a significant diversity of resolutions, forms and scales. Sculpture also appears in her work due to such extent; first, as an extension of the pictorial exercise, then, as an evidence of a concern with the scale of the body and with the space occupation that has, over time, come to assume a more recurrent place in her work. However, the boundaries that separate painting from sculpture, in Teles’ work, remain very thin, so the works must be understood as part of a single comprehensive game. What matters, fundamentally, is the material and perceptual transmutation that guides her decisions; it is key not only to understand the work as a whole, but also to understand every movement within it.

Aliquid stat pro aliquo – which means to represent, to be instead of something else – is evidence and expression of this. The exhibition is guided by the idea of a constant transmutation of perception that modifies the works in a way that does not allow a fixed categorization, whatever it may be. There are no sculptures that are just sculptures, or paintings that are just paintings, or an understanding that is just one or the only understanding – or the only way to understand the works. The objects are worth by themselves, being enhanced by the dialogue they have with the set. Each of them opens, by itself and in the collective, a room for change. They are liquid, non-static and, whenever we look at them again, they reveal us new perceptual possibilities; because they actually change according to their own light and brightness, opacity or transparency, at the same time they acquire something from the other’s qualities of ink, scale, of the paper, the whiteness, the transparency, the metallic and round luster of the brass, the floor or what rises upwards or hangs in its direction, etc. They feed, so to speak, on the multiple possibilities they add – by themselves, or toghether as a whole – to the experience, merging our perceptual data with the multiple sources of that data, which means that we are not aware if our perception of the work comes from our hands, or from the eyes, as well as we cannot identify the moment when the artist’s gesture echoed in us, nor even the path we took to understand what each of these works seems to us (to be), in the present.