Samuel Ferreira – “Antecâmara”

ANTECÂMARA

The fatality underlying life binds the connection of Man, as being-to-death, inseparable from
the divine. The imminence of loss and the difficulty awaken the connection that sustains the
divine hope of Salvation. In this sense, and since forever, that in addition to integrate a
ritual, the votive offer, exposes the human fragility that is expressed through a request or
promise associated with an object. The oblation, act of offering to God and to the saints,
has its iconographic value present in the symbolic invocation of the forms, being the
expression of devotion, of consecration of the promise, retribution and gratitude to God.

This exhibition by the artist Samuel Ferreira, brings together a set of works that propose the
questioning of faith and the role of belief as a salvific engine for the preservation of life, as
well as of the inevitable and equalizing certainty of death and disintegration of the body.
In seeking to make explicit the inherent spirituality and in the same way that the promises
are translated into foundations in the life of the believer, the artist establishes a formal
parallelism with structures and objects that have as principle of support and sustainment. In
this way, recognizable structural objects are appropriated and reproduced in wax by the
artist, and they have latent the indication of residual movement of the presence of the
stagnated body.

Wax, the primordial matter of religious offerings, retains its sacral value insofar as each
sculpture gathers in itself a set of individual promises and intentions, corresponding to old
offerings that the artist melts and transmutes into the new objects.
Becoming metaphors for the human need for shelter and protection, the mysticism that
resonates in objects, is anchored also in the very nature of the material used. The wax
unfolds in the dichotomies solid and liquid, impermeable and permeable, opaque and
translucent, malleable and brittle. It is a fragile and temporary material at the same time that
has always and paradoxically been used for objects destined to endure.
In an exercise of rigor and asceticism emerges Andaime (2019), central work of the
exhibition. It is the faithful reproduction of a building scaffolding that seems to indicate and
leverage spiritual ascent and physical elevation. In an inverse movement, Última morada
(2018), photographic work, portrays the descending movement, the return of the body to
the earth and the possibility of the ascension of the spirit. In turn, Grampo (2018), refers to
the object that unites and sustains.

From the visible marks on the surface of the objects, the sculptural work Cura (2018) brings
to light the traces of human presence and the temporal dimension that is suspended. It
seems to invoke also the request associated with the aid in disease as well as the
assumption of the physical frailty.
The works presented are metaphors of belief as matter, of the maximum expression of
private will and faith in a movement that now gains expression by becoming collective and
common.

Perhaps we are all in this antechamber, the space and the border that exists in the tension
of Man towards the eternal or any other form of transcendence: the overcoming of the
contingent and the singular finite.

Carolina Quintela
Lisbon, June 2019