Gonçalo Sena: Língua de areia
Unfolding material connotations, social codes, and the impermanence of human-made objects or interventions, Gonçalo Sena’s art practice has a magnetism that feels as grounded as it does conceptual. In person, the artist is as generous and softy direct in his speech as the visual poetics felt in his work. Seeing his art has the same effect as listening to him describe his practice: constantly searching for the exact gestures and welcoming multiple viewpoints. Throughout his work, philosophical poetics and context sensitivity shine through in accepting the impermanence of all things and artistic explorations of temporalities.
I met Sena on a quiet backstreet in Penha de França. Having seen Língua de areia at Galeria Filomena Soares earlier that same day, the artist was easy to spot: tall, with a soft, certain posture and a tote bag casually thrown across his shoulder—of course this must be him. As we start talking, I quickly realise how much of his thinking is connected to friendship, affinity, and quiet, deep connection. It made complete sense that he invites artist friends to participate in dialogue with his works, be it through performances, sound installations or poetic texts, and that he runs a publishing project, ATLAS, together with the artist Nuno da Luz, that is focused on artists’ books and other experimental collaborations.
It was also through affinity with artist friends that 2007 saw Sena begin to exhibit his work, bringing his sculptural explorations from a side practice to his work as a graphic designer into the public space. In fact, his works reach their full potential first when placed in an exhibition context as the sculptural installations move the viewer in carefully choreographed movements around exhibition spaces. This architectural quality places Sena’s work in a wider context of sculpture in the expanded field,[1] where the bodily experience of the exhibition comes to the forefront. Here, the spatial understanding from his graphic design practice appears clearest: as we begin to speak about the Língua de areia exhibition, Sena pulls out a pen to draw the planned choreography and the various viewpoints (including from above) on the exhibition plan.
With quick strokes, he explains how the spatial composition is designed to move the viewer, drawing out why the exhibition feels so physical. Entering at a strange angle so as not to stumble on Coluna Passagem (2024), whose tilted shape and scattered reed leaves make it feel unstable, the viewer is brought into a fast-paced oval movement around the angular fountain installation that makes up the central piece of the show. This movement is intensified by the rushed sound of running water from the fountain, allowing only potential pauses at the three sem título pastel-coloured concrete benches on the structure's three far sides. Inside the low, black water basin are three fountain-sculptures: two organic in feel but angular in shape and material (cement, resin, sand, bronze and dry leaves), and one old white plastic chair, a social code for relaxation and the human, with a cement sculpture placed squarely on top. The former two, Lágrimas de vento and Língua de areia, breathe water through pump-driven pipes, while the latter, Rocha Rouca (sol sol nuvens sol nuvens vento chuva vento chuva), is static, separated but bathing in the same environment as a top-heavy, alien observer.
Gonçalo Sena, Língua de areia. Exhibition views at Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon, 2024. Photos: João Neves. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Filomena Soares.
1-2: Lágrimas de vento, 2024; 3-4: Língua de areia, 2024; 5: Rocha Rouca (sol sol nuvens sol nuvens vento chuva vento chuva), 2024;
As you enter the next room, the unexpected rush of the movement is slowed down by the measured rhythm of the drawings on the walls that force you to stop in the middle: placed one footstep apart, the sketches are strict and linear, giving you a beat that is in opposition to the incessant rush of water from the fountain-sculptures in the previous room. “STEP STEP STEP STEP STEP,” as Vanja Smiljanić, an artist friend of Sena’s, writes in the poetic exhibition text. In this, she explores vowels, actants, mirages, the act of sitting, materials, and geometry, mixing more formal descriptions with experimental poetry, vocalisations, and actions.
The second room becomes thereby a mirroring of the first, yet another way to see the formal questions posed by the central fountain piece. As often with sculptures in the expanded field, the show works like a stage where the viewer is the main actor, and each expected point-of-view holds its treasures as unexpected images of the staged space. For example, when seated, the vertical fountain obscures the view from one bench to another, and the water seems to flow directly from the inside of the sculpture with the pump out of view. Smiljanić describes the stage of the fountain in yet another way: “Action 1: Three actants are sharing one dark pool. (waiting) / Possibly operating in different time dimensions.” It is this temporal aspect, inherent in running water as an endless passage of time—oppressing in the first room and graciously fading away in the second—that plays a key function in Sena’s work.
Interesting, then, to see Sena’s upcoming exhibition in Estufa Fria, Chuva Suor, which features sculptural interventions in one of the ponds of the cold greenhouse, a contribution from sound artist Raw Forest, and a text from curator Bernardo José de Souza. Interacting with the Estufa as a simultaneously organic and artificial space due to being a greenhouse built in the space of an old stone quarry, it will be curious to see how his carefully choreographed work will appear in the semi-open and public waters of the pond, especially since it promises to explore the harmonious combination of human-made and natural materials that is so present in Sena’s practice in a new context, revealing their respective temporalities.
In Língua de areia this combination of artificial (concrete, resin, bronze, duct tape, black plastic) and natural (water, leaves, bamboo, stones) materials is furthered by the very form of the sculptures, which altogether create a feeling of impermanence. The sculptures seem to be about to move, or at least they could move, without thereby being animated. The title, an expression for "sandbank" in Portuguese, likewise alludes to something temporal (a sandbank appears in low tide only to disappear when the tide is high). The words of the expression are revealing, too: língua meaning tongue, i.e., the moving muscle of communication, and areia meaning sand, which is impossible to get a grip on. In fact, the impermanence of Sena’s work is specifically with objects that we usually perceive as permanent: big sculptures in concrete somehow look fragile and temporal, while the natural elements we perceive as temporary, reeds and leaves, that complete them seem to be destined to last longer in time. For several of his exhibitions, the artist also plays with this concept through his use of posters. For Língua de areia, he created a series of 40 silkscreen prints: 20 numbered and available at the gallery, and another 20 posted around Lisbon, in an expectation of their gradual disappearance by wind, rain and people.
Seeing the show, I kept involuntarily looking back over my shoulder to check if the sculptures had moved (turns out the two fountain-sculptures vibrate with the water and have moved, albeit minimally, since the exhibition opened).[2] In another work in Erosion Horizon at Quadrado Azul in Lisbon in 2019, which featured rocks found at the Atlantic coast spread across the room, Sena pushed this idea of choreographed movement even further by asking the gallery workers to move the rocks every other day, some only a few centimetres, others up to half a metre. The movement would not be visible for any one particular person coming to see the show, but the exhibition composition would be different each day—once again, a temporality that eludes our perception. This movement and impermanence, whether choreographed as in Erosion Horizon, or formal, as in the perceived fragility of the fountain-sculptures in Língua de areia, is a central poetics of Sena’s practice: an existentialist temporality that brings a very particular uncanniness.
The impermanence is also strengthened by a constant play with mirages of repetitions. As I mention the feeling of angles and lettering in Língua de areia, Sena enthusiastically agrees, drawing out how it all looks from above: two L-shapes, two half-circles, two Xs, two rectangles and the dashed lines of a Morse code—a fake déjà-vu, as the artist calls it, that reveals his preoccupation with repetitions through various modalities. Even the first and the second room in Língua de areia are mirrors of the same feeling, exploring the same formal question in two opposite ways: one moving, the other static; one sculpted, the other drawn; both angular, with the viewer creating the circular, organic movement. Another example is the presence of the concrete benches sem título, pigmented with warm pastel colours. They are cold to the touch, big, angular and heavy, serving as resting places, while the two plastic chairs, curved, comfortable and tainted by rain and sun, instead, take the form of sculptures: one placed inside the fountain structure, and one in the second room, with a bronze casting of a cuttlefish bone placed on top that hinders its functionality.
Opposition in Sena’s work is, notably, not contrasting but rather one of harmonious addition—in the same way that the urban seaside landscape that defines the environment where the artist grew up[3] features natural elements of sand, leaves, stones and vegetation with urban ones such as cement, spray paint, plastic, and metal (the same combination of material used in his works).[4] Semi-biographical elements such as these appear tangentially in Sena’s work: the concrete benches are the same length as his height or as his height with his arm stretched, and his sculptures tend to reach as high up as he does. This self-reference is, in a way, unimportant, instead creating an organic rhythm to his work that allows elements from different exhibitions to always appear harmonious with one another, in the way a good grid system in graphic design allows all objects to float in a way that feels natural to the eye.
These details are completed with an insistence on the impermanence of objects despite their material perception as lasting due to, e.g., being made out of concrete. This insistence on temporality appears in another semi-biographical piece that returns in various modes throughout his shows: the backpack. Originally from a time when the artist was frustrated with constant travel between Lisbon and Berlin, the orange-red backpack was first shown at Syntax, Lisbon, in 2015, and more recently at the vitrine of a bar in Lavapiés, in Madrid, with a pyramid in pigmented concrete poking out as an alien object. Not surprisingly, there are actually two backpacks so far—one blue and one orange-red—and they have come up in various shows, as if they were forgotten or lost, each featuring their specific sculptures inside and exploring different kinds of feelings, as the artist tends to bring “extra elements” from his studio to complete his exhibition choreographies. Unexpected is instead the fact that he continues to see it as just an object rather than something precious; “I could use it again, I would have no problem with that,” he tells me. [5]
Many of Sena’s sculptures reappear in several exhibitions, revealing this particular consciousness of impermanence also in his wider practice: his pieces function as a vocabulary, mutating as they travel back and forth through time and space, changing meaning in accordance to their new site as words in new syntaxes. The pieces in Língua de areia that have been shown before are almost unrecognisable from the documentation, their meaning found not in their particular forms but in their compositional relationship to the space and the viewer, acquiring the site-specificity of his exhibitions. Perhaps that also explains why the artist views exhibitions as a “suspension in time” of an artist’s practice, temporal anchors of pieces that, more often than not, engage with questions of impermanence and temporality. As Sena puts it, the pieces “mutate in how they exist, in how they deliver to the public.”[6]
To get to grips with Sena’s art practice and the magnetism of his works, we need to understand this impermanence as an existentialist philosophy: a particular consciousness that comes into play through his visual language. If we get to grips with the poetics of a material not as permanent but as the way that this material looks today—i.e., with the possibility of breaking, changing, eroding—we can see it as something that is temporal in its formal essence and holds multiple timeframes at the same time. Instead of seeing his artworks as precious, Sena embraces their temporality as human-made objects to be used and re-used, to change modality, to skip through timelines. When they move from one exhibition suspended in time to another, their communicative essence also becomes temporal and impermanent.
A fantastic example of Sena’s investigation of this material impermanence and temporality of form within one show is untitled (Canal Caveira), from 2015. The piece features a plastic bag filled with water hanging in front of an open window and a suspended thin concrete sculpture forming an elongated triangular block that, from the front, looks like a thick line drawn in space. The plastic bag with water is used in many hot countries, including Portugal, as a way to scare off flies—a socially coded story, unreadable for a North European audience but easily recognisable by anyone from the South.[7] It is placed in the open window, which would invite one to look outside, had it not been for the clearly visible tension of water in the bag, and had it not been placed in this drawn composition where all the elements seem to be about to burst, fall, or, at the very least, sway in the wind.
With Língua de areia, Sena brings all these diverse explorations together in a show whose size and scope reveal his visual language as a new understanding of time, space, and form. This philosophical poetics is furthered by the interplay of modes and temporalities that underpin his practice for the last decade—something that I am sure will be pushed even further with his upcoming intervention Chuva Suor in Estufa Fria, opening on 22 May 2024.
Maria Kruglyak is a researcher, critic and writer specializing in contemporary art and culture. She is editor-in-chief and founder of Culturala, a networked art and cultural theory magazine that experiments with a direct and accessible language for contemporary art. She holds an MA in Art History from SOAS, University of London, where she focused on contemporary art from East and South East Asia. She completed a curatorial and editorial internship at MAAT in 2022 and currently works as a freelance art writer.
Proofreading: Diogo Montenegro.
Gonçalo Sena, Língua de areia. Exhibition views at Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon, 2024. Photos: João Neves. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Filomena Soares.
Notes:
[1] Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (1979): 30-44.
[2] Conversation with Gonçalo Sena, 16 March 2024.
[3] A residential neighbourhood of four-storey concrete apartment blocks with enclaves of green and abandoned spaces, close to the Cascais coast and Sintra mountains. Conversation with Gonçalo Sena, 16 March 2024.
[4] In Sena’s fountain works, there is an additional DIY aesthetic of duct tape and black plastic that seems to refer to an urban Berlin aesthetic, a city where he spent a significant part of the last decade. Conversation with Gonçalo Sena, 16 March 2024.
[5] Conversation with Gonçalo Sena, 21 March 2024.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.