Plan F

About

Plan F: Nelson Cunha

The works in this exhibition are visual experiments that aim to throw up and reference alternating conventions of art history whilst signifying the artists split personality and roles he undertakes in life. Self-reflection, signaling ideas of authorship, authenticity and identity are at the heart of this choice of works.

The often deliberately opposing works in ‘Plan F’ reference the modernist (painterly) tradition and then aim to subvert or undermine it by introducing new technologies of making and belief.

The practice uses or quotes these conventions and then introduces intricacies or narratives of a more subjective nature. The split identity of the artist’s alternating roles in life, as artist, as father, as worker, fuels the meeting point(s) between many of the works in this exhibition and yet an Independence and a reformation of these identities makes up a whole.  

Cunha seeks to reveal a beauty or multi layeredintricacy in the way the works are constructed; layers of construction in the making of the art object aim to echo a multiplicity of different layers or roles one has to occupy and ‘perform’ through, in life. A self conscious and contradictory methodology is at play within the exhibition; especially with setting the exhibition within a Church.

The artist’s various identities are often conflated and have contributed to the artist he is today. What begins as an attempt at singular contemplation of each work, soon becomes corrupted into split and fragmented readings of the works on display.

As momentary forms become distorted through frantic and personal practice, the viewer is left with a testament to the difficulties of our existence with influences as diverse as Van Gogh, labour saving Industrial floor cleaning equipment, Arte Povera, process painting and Pollock.