“The first thing that comes to mind is an image
that for some reason strikes me as charged with meaning,
even if I cannot formulate this meaning in discursive terms (…)
Around each image, others come into being, forming a field of analogies, symmetries, confrontations”(I. Calvino, in Six Memoranda for the Next Millennium)
Abstract is the result of Cão Solteiro’s collaboration with visual artist Vasco Araújo, who, since 2009, has been exposing the processes and political circumstances of artistic creation, testing the limits around what is private and public, personal or transmissible, and the possibilities of crossing different languages. Abstract summons the unfolding of the meaning of the words abstract/abstracto for a performance that is both a reflection on the path traced in this partnership and an incursion into abstraction as an artistic current, from a non-historical perspective, but in its various ramifications in contemporary art. A hypertextual narrative is put forth, with references in theatre, performance, and the visual arts, playing with the audience’s expectations, distanced from literal references, in the construction of subjective images, and, above all, in the possibility of leaving readings open.
