Contra Tempo - Pedro Versteeg

Humanity's oldest and most persistent fight is and always will be against time. To be human is to want to rule time, to make it follow the rhythm we decide upon, to capture it in moments we wish to hold for ourselves. But time is shrewd and it slips from between our fingers, like sand from an hourglass, ready to strike when we least expect it. Its passage can give rise to empires and crystallise memories or in a mere second reduce us and all our works to dust. This time that passes by against itself contains several faces and runs on different speeds, but none of them bows before human domination, no matter how many tricks humanity tries. 

The exhibition Contra tempo by Pedro Versteeg addresses the idea of time against itself. Human time and nature time, the time of memory and the time of dreams, the time of the world we live in and the time of the world we can build. The artworks, including drawing, ceramic and painting, guide us to a world of animal spirits, in contemporary fables that confront our souls and society with a mirror.

We understand the weight of time and the memories that complete it, accumulated gradually in layers that cling to each other and create an amalgamation of perspectives. No memory is smooth and flawless. They are by themselves complex, solid, made up of several pieces which together create a whole. We feel this process of sedimentation in Versteeg’s work. Layers of paper, paint and clay pile up on each other in a frenzied construction that reminds us of the myths of before, where every new version and new narrator were part of the final version. For what is memory if not a personal myth?

From the myths we also welcome the animals, symbols of our virtues and vices, who show up in powerful positions - watching over armies and deciding humanity’s fate - or in day to day scenes - in a city that is part Lisbon, part Macau and part New York, eating street food and feeding the urban underbelly - humanised in their habits of vanity, bravery or loneliness. These images come to life and to matter in ceramic sculptures, characters created by moments and recollections, fragments from the tales they come from. They are made up of the artist 's memories and songs, a vehicle for imagination and thought.

This world, where mythical and banal meet, culminates in a majestic tryptic where the animal gods - humanity’s first gods and for that, perhaps the most pwerful - cast their pieces in the ultimate chess game. Time bends on itself, past indistinguishable from future, where human architecture is overrun by timeless nature. For the real time is Nature’s and that one is running out.  

With this disconcerting work, Pedro Versteeg invites us to reflect upon human and animal nature, on time that guides and destroys and on the treacherous paths of memory which change at every turn.

Time will always be allied and enemy, lost and found, unchangeable and inconstant. Only when we accept that it will never belong to us can we find the answer to what it means to be human.