PASSAGE: ALICE QUARESMA + ANGELIKA SCHORI

Press Release

Pablo’s Birthday proudly presents the exhibition Passage, a two-person show of the
artists Alice Quaresma and Angelika Schori. The artists both deal with deconstruction,
color, geometrical shapes, and incorporation of the space into their work.

Alice Quaresma
A project involving a two-wall installation with layers of photography overlapped with
materials that questions chronology and motion. The artist continues to investigate
the limits of photography as a medium of truth and precision. Alice Quaresma brings
a new element to her exhibition at Pablo’s Birthday gallery, motion, with an
installation, where any layer is impermanent. Each photograph is chosen with the
intent to create an imaginary place. The photographs carry hints of a natural
environment that requires time to be identified. Over the act of observing the work,
Alice takes the viewer into an engagement with the materials juxtaposed over the
photographs. The artist gives enough information to welcome the viewer into the
work, at the same time, there is space for each person to build their personal
narrative. “Passage” is about questioning possibilities and dealing with the unknown.
A lot of the discoveries in Alice’s process happen while she is confronted with the
printed images. All the images used by Alice come from her photo archive of 14 years
living abroad. The photos gain meaning when they are materialized on paper, making
the artist revisit her memories.
As part of her creative process for “Passage” Alice took a quote from one of her
favorite photo books, “On Photography” by Susan Sontag: “But print seems a less
treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than
photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about
the look of the past and the reach of the present.”
The way Susan Sontag refers to photography as a “Mental Object” leads to the
discussion of portraying truth and reality with the photo camera. Quaresma takes
Sontag’s critique as permission to abandon the assertion of objectivity and depart into
the realm of imagination.
The artists states, “I’m creating an imaginary reality that I’m inviting people to make
their truth by using images that are subjective - breaking out of the confines of a fixed
frame creates possibilities, the installation welcomes these possibilities; questioning
photography’s rigid assertion of objectivity.”

Alice’s work emerges from subjectivity, bringing improvisation and unexpected factors
into her art practice. She is curious to provoke questions in the viewer, choosing to
work with photographs that lack in detail. The decision to work with geometry over the
photographs is crucial to break with the representational aspect.

Angelika Schori

Angelika Schori expands our thoughts on painting by liberating it from its historic
structure of frames, canvas, and even its surface, into the space itself. By introducing
the primary elements of light and color into the viewing experience predominantly by
way of an immaterial reflection, the works take on a generative presence that extends
into, and becomes part of, the environment in which they reside. The "image"
becomes more than the indivisible object, rather an active phenomena of color,
shape, and light. By breaking up surfaces and overlaying elements, Schori challenges
our classic idea of painting in the service of freeing it to be something more than our
expectations, inviting us to pause and let the subtle shimmering effect unfold.