La Nuit — Jeanne Bucher Jaeger | Paris, Marais Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 20 → July 19, 2014

The Gallery announce a new exhibition of Rui Moreira. The exhibition, entitled La Nuit (The Night), is part of a trilogy of exhibitions that began in 2010 with the artist’s first solo show at the gallery entitled Inner Monsoon. It is the opportunity to present the artists’ drawings created over the last two years.

Drawing from within

Rui Moreira’s work draws inspiration from his travels, and the destinations are chosen with great care. From India to the South Moroccan desert and through different regions of his native country Portugal, he carries out an intense work of observation and investigation. This fieldwork is an essential part of his work. He speaks of: “_intense inner experience that gives more depth to drawing_”. During his journeys of exploration, the artist experiences both physical and psychological changes inherent in the territories he visits: overwhelming heat of the desert, blinding light of the sun, freezing temperatures in the mountains where the Ganges spring, extreme humidity of the Amazonian jungle, solitude and almost absolute silence … Continuously absorbing both physical and visual information for his drawings and diaries. Upon returning from his travels he endeavours to experience the natural cycle of each space, from dawn to dusk. This intense feeling of Time is at the heart of Rui Moreira’s’ drawings. Thus, they truly become inner landscapes, captured states of mind. Besides this fundamental physical aspect his drawings are nourished by a wide variety of stimuli, such as Google Earth, films by directors such as Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, Herzog, Syberberg or Kubrick, and music, from composers such as Bach, Stockhausen and Ligeti, to influences from traditional Indian, Japanese, Portuguese and Arabic music. His work is also influenced by significant historical works as Piero della Francesca’s frescoes or Herberto Helder’s poetry among others.

Rui Moreira, The Holy Family II, 2014 Gel pen and gouache on paper — 141 × 259 cm Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Jaeger Bucher / Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Back in his studio, in order to nurture his artistic vision, Rui Moreira strives to create conditions similar in intensity to his travels. Changing places and materials, modifying the light, Rui Moreira recreates a nomadic atmospheric tension, physically and psychologically.

Indeed, his works result from repeating a simple action: the artist patiently, at length and tirelessly fills the entire space of his drawings until his body is exhausted from excessive conditions of immobility and gravity. This intense state of meditation aims to loose all points of reference creating a deeper visual experience.

The extract of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film presenting the discourse by Grand Chief Seattle will be screened at the gallery during the show.

Rui Moreira, Big Black I, 2013 Archive pen and China ink on paper — 215 × 140 cm Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Jaeger Bucher / Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Drawings that are rich in details and inspired from the artist’s travels emerge from this intense ritual practice. Rui Moreira excels in the delicacy and richness of his precision, which mixes decorative, geometric and abstract patterns with figures evoking mythical characters or divinities. As these divinities, Rui Moreira’s’ drawings are inhabited by a new form of life and beauty revealing new possibilities.

Deep in the Night

The new series of drawings presented in the exhibition La Nuit (The Night) is strongly inspired from the 1985 eponymous movie by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg that profoundly impacted the artist. Following on from the tradition of hymns for the night, texts, figures and images from Plato, Novalis, Höderlin, Nietzsche, Goethe, Wagner, Shakespeare, Beckett, Céline and Chief Seattle, the 6-hour monologue movie in which the sole actress Edith Clever, in a dark room, recites emblematic universal text that glistens like a flame in the night. This movie is a poem, a total asceticism with dazzling lighting on Edith Clever. The speech pronounced by the Grand Indian Chief Seattle, when British colonials offered to buy the territories from his tribe, had particular impact on Rui Moreira. In his speech, the Grand Indian Chief announces the dark days white men would face if they divert from Nature: “It is ceasing to live and starting to survive”. He evokes both the misfortunes men will have to face and the remedy for this catastrophe: the return to Nature. This extreme reduction to the essential of Black and White contrasts with the world of advertising with its multitude of colours, provoking a profound meditative consciousness and progressively leading us to an inner world where forms flow together to complete each other, without boundaries.

Rui Moreira, The Machine of Entangling Landscapes VII, 2011 Gouache on paper — 160 × 239 cm Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Jaeger Bucher / Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

These new drawings echo the multiple crises contemporary world is facing. Far from resigning, the artist chooses to renew himself from within by covering the entire paper with complex forms drawn from intense states of being. Suddenly arising from an unequalled ascetic work, day and night, his drawings represent Hope, like Dawns spreading into our Night. Like a shamanic experience, this accumulation of forms and details at the heart of the work is absorbing. Both lines and details of the drawing become infinitely meticulous. A mere change of line orientation is enough to alter the reflection of light through an infinite shimmering of colours.