In a 2009 interview, Henrique Oliveira placed his work in between the categories of painting, architecture and sculpture and stated that his purpose was always to “create tension in the space.” This search for the limits of space and, through its exploration, to provoke the spatial perception of the public (perhaps even upset it, being that it propels visitors’ entire bodies outside their comfort zone) reaches a new level in the exhibition Realidade Líquida [“Fluid Reality”], presented at Galeria Millan from July 19th on.
Henrique fills the exhibition space of the gallery with emptiness. The walls, the ceiling and the floor are the same as always, but completely deformed by an interference by the artist: the planes, softened, converge in a perspective that’s almost hallucinatory. If, on the one hand, there’s nothing to see, the rupture with the sensation of familiarity of the space is an invitation to a shift in spatial perception: there are no works in the canonical sense of the word, but there is a strong presence in the space, as there were something behind the walls, ready to tear them or like the result of an inexplicable phenomenon of strange results.
The second floor of the gallery contains the sculpture Condensação [“Condensation”], composed of a block of eleven mattresses juxtaposed in a vertical position. The interior of this block is hollowed out, its stuffing removed and shaped into a cloud form which floats inside the cavity. In addition to alluding to the physical phenomenon of condensation of water vapor inside rain clouds, the title of this work also refers to a term used by Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams) to describe a psychic process common in his patients’ dream narratives – a process through which a single image seems charged with a plurality of simultaneous meanings.