GABRIEL CHAILE

The figures in the exhibition all have a feminine aspect, with protruding breasts and furrows describing buttocks and genitalia andopulent silhouettes recalling archaic personifications of fertility. Chaile distributes graphic markings on the faces of these works in atactile exploration of drawing, as if they were immense inscription surfaces. Curiously headless, these bodies might also be seenas hypertrophic masks, in which traces no longer produce organs, members or appendices but wrinkles and lines on a face. This isa new direction in the artist’s practice, which thus far has produced figures whose rounded, cylindrical or almost spherical contoursevoked ovens, pots or chimneys.

The show’s title is lifted from a photograph titled Principio de Semejanza, which the artist took in 2008, and alludes to thisagglutinative composition of procedures, repertoires and visual cultures, transposed to the Brazilian context, apart from theprocess of finding similarity in unlikeness. The image, part of an archive compiled by the artist over the years, a sort of register ofhis trajectory, shows two women from his family; one holds a dog and the other a little girl in their laps, searching for lice in the furand hair, respectively. The difference between a child and a dog, between a grandmother and a granddaughter, establishes anexchange that is at once intergenerational and interspecific. The paired configuration of the photograph is reflected in theexhibition, in which the flattened sculptures always occupy space in pairs, with a large and a small figure. Individually, eachsculpture is also a pair, formed by each face of their volume. The two pairs are not binary oppositions but complementarymetaphors. Recalling the photo, these forms are images of care. In a sense, it is care and the transmission of memory, togetherwith the physical properties of space and things, that create a place.

In the artist’s practice, the toolbox employed in the construction of a new body of work is always given by the context, resourcesand restrictions provided or imposed by the environment. When he worked out of Tucumán, his hometown, in proximity to themethods and techniques of the native peoples, his practice involved collecting the mud and crafting adobe according to localknowledge in collaboration with those who passed it on. When he moved to Lisbon in 2020, Chaile had to reconstruct a communalcontext in which he could work: without the friends or family that had previously surrounded him, he grew close to the immigrantLatin population, with whom he began to work, establishing a sort of nomadic community. In Brazil, he occupied Galpão andCarpintaria with his materials and tools, transforming the exhibition space into a provisional context between an archaeologicalexcavation and an open studio.

Territorial uprooting and habitation, as two poles in a dynamic relation, unfold into a central question: How is memory constructedand transmitted? His works do not draw out visual frontiers but weave a range of heterogeneous elements without establishing ahierarchy between them. They are illustrations of what Chaile calls “the engineering of necessity,” a procedure he sums up in alapidary formula: “to work from what I have to give form to what I lack.”