Man has always been conditioned by a concept that has marked his vital rhythms: time. An abstract idea –at the same time relative– that nowadays directs our routines and sometimes makes us live constrained, in constant struggle with our environment.

Within this insistent clock that marks a countdown, the footprint of the passage of time worries us greatly. However, at the same time, we are attracted by the added value –or subtracted, depending on how you look at it– that it gives to people, objects and in general to everything that surrounds us.

It is precisely this last question that Dalila Gonçalves (Castelo de Paiva, Portugal, 1982) tries to investigate through a series of installations and photographs. Using a children’s toy, a windmill (cata-vento), she creates a metaphor about time as a modifying agent. This artifact represents this duality, where the passage of time leaves a trail of memories of our daily life on the elements, pointing and scarring on them –the moving air, the meteorological–.
For her, objects are nothing more than the result of the agglomeration of experiences, places where life and its compass stamp their mark. Her work tries to trace and examine the scars that time has left on them, subjecting them to an analysis in order to know their path, but also allowing these elements to speak for themselves.

Although his production speaks to us of the transience of existence –in the manner of the “tempus fugit” so often used in the Baroque–, it also invites us to rest, to stop in the midst of this hyper-accelerated world in which we live, to observe and listen to what everything around us has to tell us.

Materials plays an important role in the work of this Portuguese artist, considering them as the engines of her ideas. In them she finds a form of expression full of revelations, through which to reflect their permeability, where the processes of artistic practice and everyday life are the main protagonists.

Her work makes us reflect on time and its progression, always in constant advance. It is the objects, marked by a history product of the person who used them and the course of life, which become the main protagonists of a temporal game where the artist encourages us in a way to flee from the speed of life, urging us to look beyond the world before our eyes.

July 2015
Paloma Soriano