It is a moment of living love for the living forces of a place that saw us grow. It is an update (neither fluffy nor pretentiously spiritual or intellectual) of our relationship with what is here and touches us, open to deconstruction, to noise and the affectionate touch of simple and beautiful things. The past is the fuel of the flame of being alive, I don’t know about the future, but it starts with what we are able to care for right now.

Daniel Melim

Daniel Melim’s intervention in the Chapel of São Luís of the Museu de Arte Sacra do Funchal had two distinct moments: the performance and, later, the occupation of the space with the objects of the action and with the video that documents it. Desacralizing the space, the performance was a moment of intoxicating intensity. From popular poems to the poetry of Herberto Helder, including a song by Max and his own writings, the words and sounds (interpreted by Daniel Melim, Mariana Camacho and others), the artist combined a diversity of materials to create a sensitive ode that pays tribute to life on earth and at sea, to the complexity of lives moulded from hardship, built on the repetition of the simple but grandiose gestures of making a living. A divergent altar, a huge open cabinet displays a polyptych of oil paintings depicting figurative and landscape elements, topped by the disturbing wooden figure of a saint who is not a saint. The sanctity of work, the compassionate booty of nature, the possible poetry of secular routine. The narrative quality of this aesthetical, anthropological and sublimely speculative work brought up the memory of a question I had heard many years ago: “Michel Giacometti, was he a scientist or an artist?” The answer could lie somewhere in between. Well, it is precisely in that between, in the fold between those two spaces, that this work has its place: a piece that effectively combines sources from the human sciences and all kinds of cultural strata to produce an impressive work of art.

Miguel Von Hafe Pérez