Hellmut Woll ///

José Pedro Croft: personal and historical perspectives

Lisbon, March 2006. Jose Pedro Croft is about to go to Brazil for the opening of an exhibition of recent work. Before leaving he sends me photographs of two recent sculptures: one shows a pentagonal block guarded on four sides by five iron fences with vertical tubing. Three of these fences are slightly higher than the block they surround, and two extend in space beyond it. A fourth is lower than the block and bears a small rectangular plaque. The fifth is placed at an acute angle next to one of the higher ones. The pentagonal block is clearly a tomb or sarcophagus. By virtue of the fences that surround it, it is also a precinct, but the fences guard the funerary monument so closely that the precinct is inaccessible. The other photograph depicts a hexagonal space composed of six iron parallelograms defined by their edges, with sheets of glass and mirrors at the corners. It too is a precinct, but it is hollow and empty; and the shapes of the parallelograms are rendered unstable and ambiguous by the contractions and expansions in the reflections of the mirrors(...)