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During his fifteen-day stay, Nicolas Havette orchestrated and directed a colorful large-scale drawing, a testimony to the villa’s identity, as seen and designed by its residents. Using local image files and the photos taken during the photography workshops, the artist and his collaborators sought to expose their experiences and memories of Torrão. By drawing over these original images projected on moveable walls with chalk and pastel, they reinterpreted the artwork. From this crossing over and overlapping of gestures with lines of different colors, drawn at different times, a mural painting was born, a work in progress of collaborative art.
For the first few days, Haavette dedicated himself to getting to know the Village and its people, by walking through the streets, talking with people in cafes and restaurants, and visiting among other places, the Torrão School Group, the Torrão Agricultural Society and the Parish Council all planned by the TARS team. Also with the help of TARS, the artist met with the students of the Alvito School Group. It was a meeting of play, planting, and portraiture in the Parque dos Encontros. He then gathered all of these stories and photographs and brought them into the AQUI workspace.
He projected these collected images on movable walls, which worked as the background for the participants’ drawings. Additionally, people added their own photographic repertoire in developing this collective album with the artist who also maintained its chromatic balance. The artist hosted between 5 and 10 people everyday at the workspace, whose ages spanned from 10 to 80.
The title of this long-term project is FORTUNAS (FORTUNES), which is a polysemy that simultaneously designates good and bad luck, abundance and scarceness. For Nicolas Havette, the value of any object, from any place, of any creation resides in the experiences triggered in each of us. This is more important than any commercial worth. But one thing is certain, these works are rich and overflowing. And luck? This arises from encounters with others. This Other, the artist who invites us to follow him on his creative adventure that is without limits from age, gender, sex. We embrace the Other in all the complexity of our human limitations.
The artist parallels his process of successive layers with the function of memory. This accumulated information is then mixed-in with the arrival of news. Within this internalization of details, is the birth of mental representation of place. This is a complex enterprise of permanent intellectual construction that pursues reality to create a common history alongside shared identities. The result overflows with energy, evoking a joyful Basquiat-like street art and primitivism. A complex and polyphonic neighborhood brought together by the grace of Art.
As in the other spaces where Havette exhibited, lived, and worked, his new FORTUNA blossomed inTorrão. Organized groups like the aforementioned students of the Alvito school and local organizations, and through chance encounters and social networks, all came to draw with him. He also dove into the local archives for images and invited people to share images taken with their cell phones. These images gathered and processed in a photography workshop became the corpus of the primary material and accompanied their shared experiences. The principle was simple, the result is a delight.
For the exhibition, the space became immersed in darkness from the matte black media support panels. When it came time to display the images with video projectors, we discovered the magic of light. The illuminated photographs were then traced with chalk and pastels by the participants. Slowly they added their own lines to the images. When certain areas became saturated with the additions, the artist orchestrated, corrected, completed, or erased to adjust the colors. He guided the participants to cover the areas that were left blank by voluntary forgetfulness. Little by little, the work expanded with and without the artist’s help. Some people spent a few minutes on a brief sketch, while others took more time to create a more finished artwork. As the days went by, the panel continued to accumulate gestures and strokes.
Using this kind of hybrid fresco of painting and performance, Havette creates a report and record of details in his photographic work that simultaneously appear and disappear. The process is infinite, the photos bounce between a work of art and a working document. By recomposing images of original frescos, Havette brings a personal perspective to collective moments with his authorial framework and is able to retell the same story in different ways.
With the same intent as the great impressionist or cubist research movements, working with the decomposition and recomposition of time and space, Havette endeavors to overcome the Euclidean perspective, the foundation of anthropocentric photographic representation. It’s his intention to give rise to the participatory perspective, in the image of our complex world of the heterogeneous universe. A place where human beings are free to live without the need to all look in the same direction. After Havette’s residence in Torrão, he named this fortunate mural: AQUI NASCEU O POETA (HERE THE POET WAS BORN).
For curator Mário Câmara Caeiro, the project addressed how an “image transmutes into a performative appropriation of the space-time of an encounter. A relational circuit created with several phases that reveals an experience of creation, co-creation, identity and limits. The drawing-painting-projection-panel is defined in favor of the dynamic image of the collective and of place. In dialogue and with openness (because painting in its powerful fragility, can and will be continued… and changed). However, something timeless within the very mechanism of photographic recording remains paradoxically translated through in-situ interactions between participants. The notion of palimpsest is thus orchestrated. In the end, the experience is that of fortunate abundance.”
Torrão.
Winter.
What a wonderful invitation:
Floating in the belly of memories, staring at young islands appearing!
Ideal season for observing those charming archipels, isn’t it?
The patient red trunks greet us silently, majestic driveway.
We will listen to you tortuous and generous friends
Old days soon will be covered by our new skin,
Spring is knocking at the door.
We are now drawing the new maps.
Public announcement : “who knows how to sail there?”
The old voice resonate.
Empty streets.
The wind with no name is already whistling, do you listen?
It’s already inventing new fables.
The river already almost vanished. Missing her bed.
When will we again appear on the edge of the archipel?
The Xarrama mirror still asking : Are we sinking or diving?
Thin road,
compass threw the mist.
Early birds.
And the song of violets vanishes under the assaults of googlemap.
The scene takes place now behind the curtain, follow me.
Leaving Torrão,
Workers,
early morning
at the gaz station
Curious gate keeper
And the vineyards are waiting to be carved out
Smart trees…
A man is surely still walking there.
Two weeks behind,
no car,
Some dust.
NH | 2023
Fotos © Nicolas Havette
2024 | 01
Curator: Mário Câmara Caeiro | TARS Team: Vasco Braga | Filipa de Assis | Francisco Quelhas
Thanks: Agrupamento de Escolas do Torrão | Agrupamento de Escolas do Alvito
