Sandra Baia | Cabeça de Cão

Matter, Scale and Performance

The present exhibition by Sandra Baía brings together a group of works that, contrary to what is common in artistic practices, possess neither a formal identity nor an apparent theme that unites them. Some of the works stem from lines of inquiry that the artist has developed recurrently and systematically, such as the chromatic and mirrored wall sculptures or the polished steel sculptures (Palma and Cabeça de Cão, both 2026), which coexist with a new group of sculptures incorporating fluorescent lights — in fact, LEDs — and rubber tubes (Vetores Invisíveis, 2026), pointing towards a different imaginary, perhaps closer to an industrial aesthetic, both through the repetition of elements and through the industrially manufactured origin of their components.

This construction of the exhibition as a divergent ensemble is, however, only apparent, because the different works stem from an interest in the way an intuitive rationale, grounded in the experience of a place, may be either a memory of the artist or the very place in which the works are installed.

This ensemble can, however, be aesthetically translated into a language that is foreign to that very place. To say that this body of work revolves around Sandra Baía’s experience on the island of Príncipe tells us nothing about the meaning of the works, but it does reflect upon her working process and, consequently, upon its meaning — that of the process itself, rather than of the works in themselves; and at the centre of this process is translation, the conversion of one language into another: of a situation into an object, of one reference into something else, of the experience of a place into a constructive possibility. What remains, evidently, concealed is the process of conversion, of mutation — that is, how a sensation of a place or a memory is transformed into an object which, in turn, evokes other memories and references.

There are artistic practices that occupy different positions in relation to the very notion of material transformation, whether because they are connected to specific forms of using technique, material, or the notion of labour that they invoke: they may originate in the artist’s hand, in a drawing that serves as a commission for someone else to execute, or in a mere description of a desire, an intention, or an ambition. This is to say that the development of an artistic project is not always indexed to questions of producing meaning through an allusion to certain material conditions of life, their possibilities and ambitions, but that there are other procedures that are more literally, or more intensely, bound to the material, technical, or physical conditions of the devices brought into play. In a text from the 1970s, Portuguese musicologist Jorge Lima Barreto drew attention to an essential, albeit apparently self-evident, fact about creative materiality in music: “there are no compositions for saxophone before the invention of the saxophone” (Lima Barreto, 1974). What this means is that the meaning of poetic production always derives from a material pre-existence. This does not mean that the emergence of a given device cannot stem from a specific need — the need to find a sound that has not yet been deliberately produced, in the case of music, or to find a solution for producing a particular visual or haptic impact or form, in the case of the visual arts. In either case, the task is to find:

First, the device; then, the way of working with it in order to discover its specificity. Finally, the poetics that may emerge are derived from the echo of a material and technical possibility.

Robert Smithson, in a 1964 text on Donald Judd, wrote that Judd could travel hundreds of kilometres to find the exact paint — automotive paint, to be precise — for a series of new works he was

developing. The focus of the text is this search for the metallic paint (Lavax Wrinkle Finish), the relentless pursuit of the exact finish for the industrial appearance of the works Judd was developing at the time, and the enormous physical effort involved in finding it, as though an appearance of complete absence of manual labour and expression required an enormous amount of determination and commitment, namely considerable physical effort. Recalling Smithson’s text is interesting in understanding the intensity of Sandra Baía’s effort to find the exact method for producing her works. She too may travel long distances and conduct extensive research in order to find the technical solution — or the device — that will allow her to complete the process of her sculptures, knowing that, in the end, the solution may constitute the possibility of materially producing objects that could not even have been conceived had the technical device not been available. And, curiously, this device, which leads her along a conceptual path but, above all, on a material odyssey, also leads her to discover a set of aesthetic solutions that she herself makes literal in the memory of, or evocation of, a place.

The question is, however, more interesting because at times her references seem to float within her own experiences, while at other times they plunge into the works of artists whom we all admire, some more recognisable, others certainly more obscure. While we can clearly recognise a relationship with the spherical and reflective sculptures of Gerhard Richter, Walther de Maria, or Anish Kapoor, it is not certain to what degree the artist relates to these references, although the establishment of a particular culture of interpretation (rather than appropriation) seems important, insofar as the possible formal connections emerge from entirely subjective relationships that are detached from the semantic content of the references. Likewise, the works incorporating light seem to result from a strange intimacy between Dan Flavin, Rebecca Horn, and Keith Sonnier, yet it is by no means evident that these are relevant references in her trajectory. Rather, the possibility of constructing a structure connecting the ductility of rubber with the hardness of industrial light, wrapping the ensemble in a heteroclite structure that resembles a parasol on a nighttime terrace ready for a dance, is probably more significant.

In this sense, what seems truly important is the performance of each of these sculptural objects. They are certainly presences in space, entities that invoke the history of art since the second avant-gardes. We can name the tradition of monochromatic painting; the attempt to synthesise objects intended for the wall, such as paintings, and objects intended for space — commonly regarded as sculptures; the use of objects derived from industry, such as fluorescent lights, even if they are now produced with LEDs; the rejection of the mark of the hand, replaced by industrial production; and the search for materials that appear to eliminate expressiveness. Through all these processes, however, what is most relevant in Sandra Baía’s production is the way in which the performance of the process of making occupies a central place in her trajectory: there is a performativity in the way her sculptures and three-dimensional objects, whether wall- or floor-based, affect space, performing their presence. This is precisely what happened with the piece she presented in Elvas, Cobrir para Vestir de Novo, 2024. It was a structure (the term “structure” is used rather loosely here, because it was an inflatable that covered a building belonging to Elvas’s heritage complex), doubly monumental, both as an enormous covering for a building that was itself a monument, and as something that induced a memorial meaning.

But what is essential is that the work could be directed towards several referential and semantic dimensions.

At times as an ironic metaphor for shelter, the raft, and safety; at others as an evocation of the historical dimension of the pneumatic form as a model for postmodern sculpture,

as occurred in the projects of Carl and Heidi Buscher, the effectiveness of Sandra Baía’s intervention lies in very direct dichotomies — between the soft and the hard of the built environment,  between the aerial and the solid in architecture, between the temporary nature of the pneumatic form and the permanence of the building. But what remains, what is central, continues to be the performativity of an entity whose performance resides in the process.

Thus, this project that we can now see, while anchored in a memory of the island of Príncipe, is about conversion, through a process of translation, into something else: hybrids, entities that produce meaning beyond their stated rationale because they release a kind of performance through the effectiveness of their presence. They are sculptures that remind their author of places, and remind us of other artists and other lineages, but above all, they embody an enormous freedom to affect space, our relationship with it, and, through this, our ability to construct an imaginary grounded in the brutal materiality of these works.

Finally, a few words remain to be said about the scale of the works.

In Portugal, we are not very accustomed to the scale of Sandra Baía’s interventions. Notice that I have not referred to size. The size of a sculpture or painting is measured in centimetres or metres. Scale is a relationship, whether with the viewer’s body, with the space that accommodates the work or for which it is made, or with the expectations of the representational process.

In none of these senses is the scale of Sandra Baía’s work insignificant. On the contrary. Her scale is very clearly established, perhaps within a tradition that is not followed by most Portuguese artists: perhaps Fernando Calhau, but very few others, in the Portuguese context. This is not a question of the work having an imposing or monumental size. Of course it does, but scale is not equivalent to size. Scale is a precise relationship between the viewer’s body, probably the anticipated body of the viewer, the artist, and the space that receives the works. It is within this complex equation that the set of nuances is constructed — between recognition and strangeness, between comfort and unease, between the rationality of the choice and the intuition of the decision — that have come to define Sandra Baía’s work.

Between the exact finish, the choice of the right material, and the definition of scale that reflects the relationship between the work, the viewer, and the space, Sandra Baía’s work navigates the field of uncertainty, of what requires presence and performativity in order to acquire meaning. More than that: in order to live, as an effort to bring into existence some memory, an experience, a curiosity about a material, a finish, an imbalance, a contradiction between a weight and a form.

— Delfim Sardo, September 2026

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