Igor Jesus | Banho Maria

The new exhibition that will occupy the Exhibition Room of the Escola das Artes (EA) features Igor Jesus, who was, in 2020-21, one of EA's guest artists. "Banho Maria" will present a series of new works by the artist, curated by Nuno Crespo.

"Banho-maria" is a name which serves to describe many procedures ranging from chemistry, industrial processes (pharmacy, cosmetics, etc.) to cooking. Regardless of the scope of its application, "banho-maria" designates a process of slowly heating a liquid or solid substance which is inside a container which is placed inside another closed container where water vapour is released. And it is this steam which raises the temperature of the different substances, with the specificity of being a very precise and demanding process from the point of view of controlling the different manipulated elements.

And it is this possibility of alchemical transformation, surprising and very radical, that interests Igor Jesus. He is not interested in enrolling in the field of alchemy, but this transformation serves him as a metaphor to approach a very elaborate process of relating and transforming images into sounds, into sculpture, into space.

The approach that the Banho Maria project materialises in relation to that alchemical process is due to an understanding that the artist has been developing in his works in which images and artistic objects are, above all, ways of capturing energies. For this artist it is never a matter of representing a thing, a person, or any other thing, but of finding devices that energetically alter the world and, of course, the subjects that experience his works. An immersive experience, because each project of this artist pulls us into zones of experience in which all human forces are activated: sensitivity, imagination, understanding and reason (to do justice to Kant and the descriptive matrix of the forces that make up human intelligence).

This does not make Igor Jesus a shamanic artist, but presents him as someone dedicated to identifying what happens in areas that are usually inaccessible to the human gaze and where we only reach through certain devices such as a camera. For this reason, in this project he appropriates the book of images by H. Baraduc with the very suggestive title: The human soul. Its movements, its lights and the iconography of the fluidic invisible (1896).

Regardless of the precise design of image construction at issue here - images produced through direct contact of a body with a chemical plate to reduce latency to a minimum - what interested this explorer of the paranormal - which is how he came to be known - was to capture, through instruments more precise than the human eye, feelings, thoughts, what emanates from a human soul, its energies. Baraduc never understood his work as photographic - which in his time required the intervention of sunlight - but rather as a very special iconography of the invisible fluids. And it is precisely this iconography of the invisible that Igor Jesus takes in hand and tries to transform into an experience that is simultaneously visual, auditory and sculptural.

Igor jesus' interest in the immaterial and spirits has been an early part of his work - at least since the video My father died in the year I was born (2014), in which the artist holds a spiritualist session -, but in this new project, what the artist builds is a kind of distillery of images: the images of Baraduc's fluids are projected onto a screen, then on this screen a set of photosensitive cells interpret the light emanated by each image and transform this light from the projection into sound. A process of sonification or, if you prefer, the translation of the visible into audible.

Tuesday - Friday | 2 p.m. - 7 p.m.

Exhibition Room of the Escola das Artes

FREE ENTRY*

*Access to the exhibition is subject to the following rules:

• Mandatory use of mask
• Hand sanitisation with alcohol gel at the entrance (available on site)
• Mandatory social distance of two metres between visitors
• Capacity limited to five visitors at a time
• Maximum duration per visit: 30 minutes

More information available here.