ARCOlisboa 2024

RocioSantaCruz presents in ARCOlisboa 2024 two international artists, Diogo Pimentão (Lisbon, Portugal, 1973) and Jean Denant (Sète, France, 1979).

Common denominator in the work of both artists is the exploration of materiality. In the case of Jean Denant, he experiments with construction materials, endowing them with an artistic purpose that generates an intentional contradiction between the grandeur of the concept and the modesty of the elements used. Through his work, he defies established conventions and blurs the boundaries between art and reality, in tune with the approaches of post-structuralist philosophy.

Diogo Pimentão’s works are located in borderline zones between sculpture and drawing. It is here where his work finds the most fruitful dialogue with Denant: in the questioning of the medium as a0 plastic but fully conceptual premise. Pimentão endows the material with illusory characteristics and constructs forms whose limits make it difficult to define drawing and sculpture. He explores the limits and expressive capacities of the components and develops a work that stands out for the fusion of medium and form.

The apparent fragility of Pimentão’s creations contrasts with the fragile hardness of Jean Denant’s works. Both have the ability to capture the ephemeral experience of movement in tangible and lasting forms. Pimentão does this through the representation of gestures and dynamic lines in his static works, while Denant creates spatial situations that challenge the perception of time and movement. In synthesis, a multidisciplinary dialogue between both creators on some current realities of our world, which induce the spectator to consider the materiality of its representation in terms of message, constitutes the conceptual framework of the proposal.