“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

Sacred Emily in Gertrude Stein's 'Geography and Plays' (1922) (1)

The imaginary world in Alexandre Coxo’s work wanders between the contemplation and meditation exercise, guided by the perseverance on mastering the technic in art. It would not be misplaced to situate his work amid the assumptions of the Prometheus and Orpheus’ myths, in the duality of the fire stolen to the gods and their enchantment through the lyre.

The exercises proposed by Alexandre Coxo for this exhibition, although individual and personal, are common to all of us. They are exercises where the liberation is processed both through stealing the fire, regarding the technic, and through the enchantment provided by meditation, thus inducing cogitative phenomenon in the viewer.

Jacob Bronowski says that “(...) rock art is, like the chipped stone instrument, an attempt to control the absent environment and both are created with the same spirit; they are exercises from which Man frees himself from the mechanical impulses of Nature.” (2)

The nature of the contemporary Human it’s a nature of emulation, based on more or less rigid social assumptions and with a primitive meaning. It’s on the attempt of giving an answer for a bigger purpose that Alexandre throws us to his imaginary of contrapositions in a depurated exercise that set us free and invites us to find the balance in the contradiction between the authorial process and the reflective essay.

(1) STEIN, Gertrude. Geography and Plays. University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. (2) BRONOWSKI, Jacob. Arte e Conhecimento: ver, imaginar, criar [The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination]. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1983.

Carlos Trancoso