Lehmann + Silva Gallery (Porto, PT)
02 Apr — 15 May 2022
In maritime jargon, placing one boat alongside another is called abarloar. Naval dictionaries do not clarify whether the vessels actually touch or merely drift close. At sea, nothing remains static. In this uncertainty, the fluid, the oscillating, and the magnetic persist sensually.
Architect Juhani Pallasmaa tells us that vision reveals what touch already knows. If touch precedes sight, do two floating bodies recognize each other just before contact, even if their surfaces are inert? The answer is that physics suspects what intuition already understands. At the atomic level, all contact between surfaces is an interaction between electrons and magnetic fields. At the human level, touch is the brain’s way of interpreting that interaction when mediated by the skin.
This exhibition explores the poetic nature of those liminal and tactile tensions that arise when two bodies come into contact. In García Bello’s sculptural practice, the formalization of those bodies draws from the asceticism of vernacular tradition, while their materialization reflects a profound connection to territory and landscape. A landscape that, in the case of Galicia and Portugal, is shaped by a fluctuating, continuous, and shared horizon: the Atlantic Ocean.
