A HEAD WITH THE SIZE OF A ROOM (OF A HONEYMOON ROOM)

 António Olaio, 2019

​

​

​

  Tiago Madaleno starts from the possibility of having a head detached from a body. Being Descartes’ head, particularly, it will be certainly a material head, but not one in which the materiality has its greater expression.

  This condition of separation from the body reminds us of a materiality that we forget our heads have, especially if we were philosophers...

  Of course, that a head without a body will certainly correspond to a body without a head. But let us leave that body floating somewhere outside this text (even if it haunts it, inevitably).

  A head that, with or without body, has in its memory the fact that Descartes (as Tiago Madaleno tells us) was fond of putting his head in the oven to think clearly.

  This is a bizarre and challenging story in the consequences it might have in the study of Descartes thinking. Here even more, by assuming other way of presentation, in the context of fine arts.

  By announcing this fact, the artist opens through his artistic condition, a whole field of possibilities of relation that, once released, have an indomitable reach.

 This exhibition is presented now, and it is, obviously, on its current experience that we can develop our perception of the story.

  When we imagine a head inside an oven, drawing from our experience with ovens (as our domestic experience), we tend to imagine a head inside a confined orthogonal space.

  Being the head of a philosopher, we can imagine it as a container of thought that by being heated increases exponentially its tendency of becoming unconfined to that narrow limits. A head that will, inevitably, explode.

  It will explode, projecting its pieces through the Space, in all directions. But this Space has limits and this head expands, stabilizing as it is shaped by the orthogonal form of the oven containing it (and that detains its expansion).

  Recalling the title of this exhibition, we might say that this Space is orthogonal as a room.

  Fortunately, the honeymoon rooms, desirably orgasmic, once they fulfill that desire, they remain orthogonal, but they forget that they are.  //