In the presentation of the exhibition, António Preto, director of Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira, provides a precious description: “All together, these figures are, after all, an unusual theater troupe; when added together, they will certainly be the largest resident company in memory.” Luís Miguel thus emerges as the creator of a peculiar theatricality: “(…) the director makes these puppets actors, characters who, being in themselves carriers of texts, stories and
very diverse senses, are compelled to interact in unexpected ways in a polyphony of gestures, looks, expressions.”
Before entering the exhibition itself, we can see the magnificent photographs taken by André Cepeda at the Lisbon house. They are not a guide to predict what we will discover inside, but rather an anthology of solitary fragments that, in truth, are not repeated in the Serralves room — more than that: they could not be repeated.
In other words: we are not dealing with an “art collection”, even less an anthology of themes, forms, styles, eras or trends. And if there are objects that surprise us due to the seduction of their artistic elegance, this does not invalidate the fact that any of them, big or small, fragile or pompous (sometimes, fragile and pompous) is distinguished by an ambiguous monumentality: each one has an existential truth that resists being diluted in the truth of the partner next door.
It goes without saying that this “Small Theater of the World” resists, point by point, play by play, any traditional dichotomy about the “seriousness” of some art versus the “futility” of another. At the limit, perhaps we can even say that we are led to discover (and, in a certain sense, inhabit) a space in which someone makes a modest autobiographical gesture, completely opposite to the confessional pornography that everyday television promotes. René Magritte taught us to live with this strangeness of things in the world, so we can risk paraphrasing him to describe such a wonderful phenomenon: “This is not an exhibition”.
Journalist