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During an artistic residency in São Paulo (BR), Fernão Cruz developed the project Liame, a series of seven sculpture-paintings created from materials found in thrift shops and construction stores — fabrics, clothing, ropes, pigments, foam, cardboard boxes. Each piece begins with the idea of a contained body that is, at the same time, in movement: boxes that were once vessels of passage now become fixed, tense structures — filled, almost on the verge of overflowing.
The project’s title, Liame (which can be translated as “bond” or “link”), emerges as a core word — a thread between the visible and the invisible. “Liame” is what connects, what unites, what holds — but not in a definitive way. It is a fragile bond, a mobile tie, a continuous tension between what comes together and what drifts apart. Here, the liame also exists between dissonant materials, between the body and memory, between affection and the architecture of gesture.
The sculptures are born as modules, but they gain autonomy. They evoke recognizable volumes — fragments of home, of body, of presence — yet strange in their composition and texture. The universe that unfolds is both intimate and distorted, as if what is familiar to us were being observed from within, from the inside-out of the skin. The titles of the works — Held Breath, Post-Bed, Chance Embrace, Fall, Grip of Shadow, Water Table, The Loop of the Self — offer clues to guide the gaze, but also to disorient it. They point to everyday spaces charged with tension and ambiguity, transitional zones between comfort and collapse.
Liame is, above all, an exercise in relationship: with space, with the body, with the other. There is a constant containment — physical, emotional, symbolic — that resonates with Carl Jung’s ideas on the collective unconscious: a common ground where gestures, pressures, memories, and myths accumulate. Each sculpture is a point of contact between the intimate and the universal, between touch and absence.
In this work, Fernão proposes a way of seeing that attends to what is confined — and to what, still, insists on moving.
For the "Transe" section, Lisbon-based artist Fernão Cruz presents Liame, a set of works in which everyday objects evoke the ghosts of a body: clothing, sheets, and mobility devices meet human limbs and other protuberances. A recurring material lexicon in his work, such as clothing pieces collected from thrift stores and discarded throughout the cities he inhabits. Mixed with his own pieces, they are then crystallized into three-dimensional forms, sometimes attached to the background, sometimes emancipated in the space itself. When not emerging as a pattern, the clothes serve as vessels for the creation of anthropomorphic sculptures, giving birth to a chimerical body that stitches together the former owners and the artist himself. A true image of Liame, a popular Portuguese expression denoting the bonds between people and things.
All produced in an inedit and intimate experience in the city of São Paulo (BR), it is undeniable that the differences in Brazilian clothing and the cultural influences conveyed by each object are a relevant fact. However, Cruz is more interested in the subjective layers enabled in the construction of an embodied subject, in which echoes of desire, mourning, pleasure, and repression are imprinted. Here, the object encounters the abject: stripping us of a functional and social interpretation of the former, the abject – as philosopher and analyst Julia Kristeva canonically defines it – is that which we must free ourselves from in order to become a self. It is a fantastic substance that combines qualities of estrangement and intimidation, disturbing divisions between the internal and the external, the maternal body and the paternal law, the spatial and the temporal.
From this perspective, it's remarkable how the sculptures presented combine – sometimes in a single work – orifices imbued with desire and disorderly proliferating lumps; asexual genitals that sometimes hide from the viewer, sometimes stare obscenely at them; empty marks of bodies on the surface that becomes present through absence, while other anatomies expand to such an extent that the distinction between figure and background becomes blurred. Furthermore, the mark of mourning pervades the room, poignant in the clothing’ debris that lead us to wonder if their fate was sealed by the discarding of what is no longer necessary or of what is necessary that is no longer present. Between Oedipal mischief and the childish perversion, Fernão navigates these axes preserving the layers of silence and secrecy, adding his own memories here and there beneath the fabric – like someone hiding in a blanket at night to feel protected from the darkness.
Another layer predates the composition of the works themselves: the sculptures' frames, always confined within boxes that delimit their scope. If, initially, such castration is a paramount in sculptural creation, its incorporation as a symbolic device now serves as drawers that open to the gaze. Intimacy is violated, just as death violates the ownership of the abandoned items that now form the objects. It is, therefore, from this enclosure that the beauty arises: the body, though contained, overflows, narrates, seduces, and haunts; like us, who move despite everything.
