A Project at the Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência in Lisbon, Portugal.

Sofia Marçal

Museums Curator

Lisboa, 2020

Gustavo Mendez-Liska Venezuelan artist, lives and works in Vienna. He develops his artistic practice in concrete and neo-concrete art that has its roots in South America, particularly in Brazil. His work acts as an appreciation of meaning and in a pure way with a strong presence of what marks are, the affirmation of one’s own materiality and forms as consciousness from the most conceptual point of view and language.

The Tectonic experiences and the experience of the tectonics were thought for this room, the Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry. The exhibition is constructed horizontally and vertically creating a movement that suggests tensions on the surface of the laboratory floor with the intention of making a geometric abstraction, preventing the grid as a definition of superficies and the procuration of a rational and mathematical order, but does not replace the composition, the experience with a contemporary look. The exhibition allows the mediation between the sky and the earth, between the ceiling and the floor and the way of connecting them ephemerally.

Gustavo Mendez-Liska intends that his works have a relationship with space, that the viewer can circulate around them and that the perspective of the piece varies according to its location, as something dynamic that is suggested as the movement is organized. Space does not exist as something pre-conceived and pre-organized, but is the fruit of the dynamic relationship with the place. The dimension is something very important in this artist’s work, the works are not contained in the museum space, and there is a clear dilatation of space and time.

The city and its architecture are a reference in the creation of the artist’s work. In the exhibition, Gustavo Mendez-Liska has a clear notion that there is a variety of points and also how the space is going to be organized in the formal or spatial relationship, is a continuous and organic action. „If I say that the city to which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, sometimes more sparse, sometimes more dense, you should not believe that you can stop looking for it. It may be that as we speak it is emerging scattered within the confines of your empire; it is possible to find it, but in the way I said.“ (Italo Calvino in: The Invisible Cities). When we enter the exhibition space we stop being in the room to be taken to the city, our imaginary city.