Marco Moreira

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Individual exhibition, in Fundación RAC, Pontevedra, Spain

Primus Movens

Curator: Anne Heyvaert

“The exhibition “PRIMUM MOVENS”, by the artist Marco Moreira, is the result of a collaboration between the RAC Foundation (Rosón Arte Contemporáneo) of Pontevedra and the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Vigo, in order to present the artistic results of research within the framework of the Doctorate in Creation and Research in Contemporary Art.

Here is shown a selection of works carried out during the preparation of the doctoral thesis entitled “Drawing machines: interactive and interactivity”, directed by Professor Anne Heyvaert, within the lines of the dx5 research group: “Field graphics expanded. The multiple that occupies the space”.

The title of the exhibition “PRIMUM MOVENS” refers us to an impulsive, primal, profound force that could symbolize the origin and transitivity of the creative act, exemplified here by the works of Marco Moreira. Through which, the artist seems to want to delve into the experience of the act of drawing, in its very genesis, which is not in the intention, but in its phenomenology, a phenomenology that results from the inherent interactivity, as he defends in his thesis doctoral.

These works, in the form of artefacts and mural installations (one specially designed for the RAC Foundation space), are like potentially interactive “drawing machines” that involve the viewer in the process, in the implicit movement that moves (in the etymological sense).

With well-defined protocols, Marco Moreira’s works are conceived and elaborated from the principles and essential elements of drawing: tools and materiality (graphite pencils, with the collaboration of the Portuguese factory Viarco), process and action, time and space. Repetition, multiplicity and automatism emphasize the human interactions that go through machines to finally express themselves as forms through drawings.

“In my work practice, I realized that inviting the public to interact actively in the construction and/or deconstruction of the work allowed the creation of an interactive relationship (artist/audience), but also to create an extension of the process from the workshop to the gallery or showroom; somehow indeterminate the author of the work and through interactivity incorporating within this same process / duration, the artist, the work and its public as fundamental elements that are culturally developed in common. ” (Moreira, 2019)

These pieces come to expose in a very intuitive and empirical way, what the artist develops in his theoretical research around the concepts of “interactivity and interactivity”, analyzing how both concepts operate in the production of a work of art. With the drawing machines, he affects the condition of the artist and the spectator as motors. The ideas of machine, motor, interactive, interactivity, body and drawing are integrated into the formation of the creative work.

Finally, these gadgets allow us to share an undoubtedly ancestral and essential idea of ​​drawing that, as a metaphor for the fusion of thought with the body and space, evokes in us a primary relationship of being connected with the world .”

Anne Heyvaert