Following our mission to spotlight the works of art curators, we created a project space dedicated to young contemporary artists.

Photo credit: Bruno Lopes, 2020

On March 5th, we inaugurated our fist Lab Box:

Joana Patrão
Céu de Sal, Sal da Terra [Sky of Salt, Salt of the Earth]
Curated by Luísa Santos

About our Lab Box:

Produced by Art Curator Grid, Lab Box project space consists in a human size white cube (1.20 x 1.20 x 2.35m) intended for an immersive experience.
Four times a year, one curator from Art Curator Grid social network is invited to challenge a young artist to create a site specific proposal.

One by one, the public enters the white cube through a thick PVC curtain and interacts alone with the artwork on display. The idea of our Lab Box is to exceed the physical reality of the space and transcend its creative potential while displaying works by a new generation of artists.

Photo credit: Bruno Lopes, 2020

Following close collaboration with the artist presented, each curator is asked to write a text to accompany the artwork. Devoted to young contemporary art creation, the Lab Box is a curatorial sandbox for curators willing to go beyond its narrow space's walls.

For this first edition, we invited Portuguese curator Luísa Santos to work on a proposal.  She chose to challenge young Portuguese artist, Joana Patrão who created a site-specific installation: "Céu de Sal, Sal da Terra" [Sky of Salt, Salt of the Earth], on view in our Lisbon-based office from March 6th to May 17th, 2020.

About Céu de Sal, Sal da Terra

A landscape with height, width, and depth, where the horizon does not give itself to a collective viewing, but rather a spectacle for a single person. A vertical made up landscape, a little larger than the size of one body, but which nonetheless offers an experience of a new here and now. The piece “Céu de Sal, Sal da Terra” [Sky of Salt, Salt of the Earth], by Joana Patrão, takes up the space of a white cube measuring 1,20m x 1,20m x 2,35m, but the potential of its creative reach goes far beyond that which is possible to measure.

The artist Joana Patrão inaugurates the Lab Box project space, a cube at the Art Curator Grid office, in the district of Lapa (Lisbon, Portugal), which will be systematically inhabited by exhibitions by young artists. For its first edition, Art Curator Grid platform invited curator Luísa Santos who, in turn, laid before the artist the challenge of conceiving this micro-exhibition, which takes the shape of an isolated and immersive experience.

Photo credit: Bruno Lopes, 2020

In the piece titled “Céu de Sal, Sal da Terra”, Joana Patrão puts forward a reflection on the role of human beings in nature. This subject which has since the beginning of time been a focus of the research of artists and architects gains particular strength currently, in an age when discussions around the degradation of the natural world and the causes and effects of climate change have become more and more urgent. By creating a sky made of salt and a ground made of lioz, a type of limestone in great use in the city of Lisbon, she points to a landscape submerged by seawater. Thus, Joana Patrão also researches the past, the present, and the future of nature. The fossiliferous limestone ground sends us to the formation of the earth and the remnants of the past; the immersive perceptual experience of the piece enhances the sensation of the present; and the suggestion of the climate crisis leads us to ponder the future of human existence on earth.

Photo credit: Bruno Lopes, 2020

Visitors are invited to step upon and touch that environment built by the artist, which is a shared piece of her imagined nature. Joana Patrão makes us raise questions about the material dimension of nature and its physical effects. She also conjures up the infinite dimension of nature, and our individual relation with it, made of imagination and perception. In the final lines of her curatorial text, Luísa Santos leaves us with the finest provocation: “The role we choose to play – confined to a micro-scale or aware of our potential for change at a macro-scale - is the sole responsibility of each of us.”

Julia Flamingo, 2020

Mar de Sal, Photo courtesy of Joana Patrão

ON VIEW

From March 6 to May 17, 2020
- By appointment only (hello@artcuratorgrid.com)

Opening Ceremony: Thursday March 5, from 6pm to 9pm

Art Curator Grid- 126 Rua da Lapa, 1200-796 Lisbon (Portugal)