Art: Fried Eggs and Cosmic Events @ The Ikon

5th Mar 2010

Con­sid­er­ing the title of this exhi­bi­tion, the viewer gen­uinely doesn’t know what to expect – food and space come to mind but that’s about all you have to go on. And so, as I walked up the stairs to the gallery, unsur­pris­ingly this was my train of thought. On enter­ing, I was told that it may take a while for my eyes to adjust to the dark­ness and when this had hap­pened, I was con­fronted with an egg. Lit­er­ally, what I saw was Por­tuguese artists, João Maria Gus­mão and Pedro Paiva’s first solo exhi­bi­tion in the UK, con­sist­ing of a num­ber of silent, colour films on the nature of move­ment. But it was far more than just a set of films on a wall.

The first screen, amongst other things, con­tained footage of an egg fry­ing, a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of dif­fer­ent suns and footage which was sped up and then dras­ti­cally slowed down. The sec­ond dealt with the move­ment of bricks, the bal­ance of a sea-saw (tipped by a fly), a set of walk­ing fin­gers and the struc­ture of a boot. Another screen was devoted to water move­ment and the final two devoted to tribal drink­ing, painted faces and a rather clever trick to make an egg tower.

I have to admit that at the time, although fas­ci­nated, I found the exhi­bi­tion con­fus­ing. With­out any per­ceived order, there were times when ele­ments seemed ran­dom. It was only when I left the gallery and read­justed to day­light that I realised that this was prob­a­bly part of the point. Nearly every object, how­ever ran­dom, has its own unique form and way of mov­ing and cap­tur­ing this is a very dif­fi­cult process. In the light of day, read­ing the guide book, I learnt that the exhi­bi­tion took inspi­ra­tion from bizarre land­scapes, the poetry of Fer­nando Pes­soa, past philo­soph­i­cal debate and even Christo­pher Colum­bus. This made a lot of the exhi­bi­tion make sense and things I had noticed but dis­missed as just – strange – became clearer when I under­stood where they had come from. This project def­i­nitely forces a viewer to take notice of the lit­tle things and suc­ceeds in keep­ing you trans­fixed by objects you might take for granted. How­ever, it does appear to be one of those sit­u­a­tions where to fully appre­ci­ate and under­stand the con­tent, you have to equally appre­ci­ate and under­stand the context.