RAR seen by...

RAR seen by Horácio Frutuoso
RAR collection 2023

Horácio Frutuoso explores various means of expression, in an expanded field of an artistic practice — in which painting plays a key role — which has enabled him to gain considerable visibility in Portugal’s visual arts scene.

Horácio Frutuoso's view of RAR is linked to distinctive notions of time and memory, fluidity and circulation, universality and local contexts. His paintings explicitly refer to images from the visits that he made to the group's various companies, in a kind of cinematic recollection, based on stills, to which he adds images that hover in the significant temporal gaps of the diverse iconography of the history of art.

… albeit in a distant manner, and specifically with regard to the reality of the production of sugar, Frutuoso has glimpsed several points of contact with something that has interested him throughout his career: alchemy as a speculative process that views experimentation as an anchor in the search for that which has been defined, but not itself defining, the inextricability of aesthetics, the famous "je ne sais quoi", the element that escapes any theoretical speculation and anchors art in that immense territory of the creation of a world in continuous conceptual and emotional upheaval.

In these paintings, made for the project "RAR seen by...", Horácio Frutuoso guides us through an idiosyncratic vision where different moments in time collide and flow. In a way, these are "old" paintings that represent a contemporary, digital world. But that is precisely the appeal of contemporary art: knowing how to raise awareness that its vocation is to propose works of art where time is nothing more than a material circumstance, to assert itself as a timeless density. In a historical moment that is beset by perplexities, arising from our compulsory immersion in the digitalisation of the world, the influence of algorithms and, consequently, the introduction of artificial intelligence into our daily lives, memory exercises, choices informed by a critical sense that is fundamental when editing reality (we are constantly editing our lives: in terms of what we consume, see and read, etc.), it is always important to emphasise that this other reality – art - is fundamental and irreplaceable for the ongoing evolution of humanity.