Rui Chafes X Alberto Giacometti – Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Netherlands

The international exhibition  Rui Chafes X Alberto Giacometti. Gris, Vide, Cris III brings together the work of the Portuguese artist Rui Chafes with that of the Swiss modernist Alberto Giacometti. With his impressive installations, Chafes offers a new, serene, and sensory experience of Giacometti’s world-famous sculptures.  Gris, Vide, Cris III , the third exhibition in an international series, is organized by the Beelden aan Zee museum in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti in Paris and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. 

Curators: Helena de Freitas and Brigitte Bloksma. The Portuguese contemporary artist Rui Chafes (Lisbon, 1966) was born in the same year that Alberto Giacometti (Borgonovo, 1901 – Chur, 1966) passed away. Although separated by time, place, and formal language, they share an artistic striving: transcendence and the visualization of the invisible. They each explore in their own way how sculpture bears witness to both presence and absence, a tension between body, space, and mind. Where Giacometti achieves this through a process of reduction, Chafes explores the boundaries of iron. A unique encounter The exhibition presents the sculptures of both artists together for the first time in the Netherlands. “Following the successful exhibition of Ryan Gander X Edgar Degas, Museum Beelden aan Zee once again has the opportunity to bring two grandmasters together in a unique encounter,” says Brigitte Bloksma, director and co-curator of the exhibition. “The architecture of our museum, with its play of natural light, forms the ideal space for this meeting, in which Chafes introduces us to Giacometti’s work in a new way. It is an exhibition that wants to be not only seen, but also experienced.”  Grey, Emptiness, Scream The concept of Gris, Vide, Cris — Grey, Emptiness, Scream — is derived from Giacometti’s poem of the same name and summarizes the thematic core of the special encounter between the two artists. For Chafes, the grey refers to the moment between visibility and disappearance, the emptiness to the space in which that experience takes shape, and the scream to the intensity of the human experience. The exhibition unfolds precisely in that in-between area, where Giacometti’s fragile human figures resonate within Chafes’s silent, contemplative world. La Nuit The sculptural work La Nuit is one of the highlights of the exhibition. Rui Chafes designed this iron structure around Giacometti’s first study in plaster, Le Nez  (1947–1950), commissioned by the Fondation Giacometti in 2018. In that year, the first Gris, Vide, Cris exhibition organized at the French branch of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti. Five years later, this collaboration led to a new exhibition in the main building of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. 

New work
For  Gris, Vide, Cris III  at the Beelden aan Zee museum, curators Brigitte Bloksma and Helena de Freitas selected ten sculptures by Giacometti that serve as the starting point for a series of sculptures by Chafes, several of which were created especially for this occasion. Central to the exhibition is not only the body as a sculpture, but also the body in relation to space and the visitor. 

A powerful field of tension
In the interplay between Giacometti and Chafes, a view of humanity reveals itself that is as vulnerable as it is timeless. Where Giacometti’s elongated figures balance between materiality and stillness, Chafes, with his iron sculptures, explores the boundaries between corporeality and emptiness. He invites visitors to enter his works.  Au-delà des yeux en Lumière are dark installations featuring  long architectural corridors in which various sculptures by Giacometti are displayed in a completely different way. With these works, the Portuguese artist presents the human figure as a temporary apparition in an infinite space. This creates a powerful tension between vulnerability and monumentality, and between form and the invisible.