A Arte como desenvolvimento espiritual: a linguagem abstrata de Rui Chafes

The paper aims to examine the transformative role of art and artists, today and in the future. We have chosen as a starting point the work of a remarkable Portuguese sculptor at the leading edge: Rui Chafes, a challenger of new aesthetic paths. Chafes is a conceptual sculptor of iron and fire who seeks and aspires to abstractionism, as a novel language and a novel vision of the world. The artist thinks his work deeply, regularly publishing texts about his work and its connections with art, beauty and life. From his imaginary artistic biography, Between Heaven and Earth, a bit like Vasari’s The Lives, we will begin by presenting the sculptor’s aesthetic and plastic universe. Then we will consider the way his unique identity path turns out to be inspiring and fulfilling. This imaginary character, born in Germany in the 13th century, absorbed the spiritual medieval gothic shapes and the sense of nature, the sublime and the absolute spirit, peculiar to German Romanticism. From his long experience we highlight learning the value of life, and the love for here and now, both rooted in a density of experiences and memories; memories, places and times which interact and dialogue with his sculptures — works which cralise the spaces they inhabit as if they had always been part of them. For Rui Chafes the future of humankind depends on our ability to incorporate memory and the past into the present, and in this sense his project is a very original and promising alliance between tradition and modernity.