Rui Chafes is a leading contemporary sculptor who rose to prominence in the early 1990s. Although the unique visual language he has developed tends to deft categorisation, his oeuvre nevertheless possesses a great stylistic uniformity.
Chafes trained as a sculptor at the Faculdade de Belas Artes in Lisbon and graduated in 1989. From 1990 to 1992, he studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf under Gerhard Merz, a notable German painter who devoted most of his career to expanding and refining the central tenets of modernism. Merz’s sharp distinction between ‘art’ and ‘life’ was crucial, as his outlook ran counter to the thinking of the younger generation of artists who, under Joseph Beuys’ sway, were striving to make just that link. Merz greatly influenced the young Chafes, who saw his own dark sculptural work not so much as autobiographical, but more as a formal way of evoking an existential atmosphere. Merz’s sensibility towards the surroundings, in which he believed artworks should function, also echoes in Chafes’s sculptures.
While studying in Düsseldorf, Chafes devoted himself to the Portuguese translation of Fragments by the renowned nineteenth-century Romantic poet, Novalis. The artist was deeply affected by the latter’s thinking on Sehnsucht [yearning], melancholy, the desire for one’s own death and the night, all of which he saw as keys to understanding reality and the ‘true’ human soul. Chafes not only worked as an artist, but also as a writer, diarist and poet. While he was fascinated by the work of other Late Romantic writers and thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin and Heinrich von Kleist, Novalis remained Chafes’ main source of inspiration. Novalis’ assertion that ‘all natural forces essentially constitute but one single all-embracing force’ guided the creation of Chafes’ drawings, his abstract and sometimes semi-figurative sculptures, and his wall and ceiling works.
Iron sculptures, the scale of which often relate to the proportions of the human body, comprise a significant part of his oeuvre. Entirely in the spirit of Late Romanticism, they not only allude to the futility of human existence, but also to an ambivalence towards the body, which is both a ‘cage’ in which the ‘I’ is trapped but also a protective armour that shields the inner self from external threats, both physical and psychological. Chafes’ oeuvre is not just thematically coherent, but also materially consistent. His metal sculptures are not cast but folded from sheets, which betrays the process behind their construction. Unlike classical sculptures, which are formed by ‘carving away’ matter, Chafes’ works are created ‘out of nothing’. This constructive aspect plays a crucial role for Chafes, although he also puts it into perspective by invariably obscuring the physical traces of his labour with black or grey paint. This ‘neutralisation’ of matter is a technique that Chafes borrowed from classical sculpture.
With such interventions, Chafes directs our attention to the terrain between his work and our perceptions, which is where the confusion arises. His physically heavy sculptures appear to float due to their pure forms and apparent immateriality. Consequently, they are always in a zone that hovers between perception and reality, between life and death, between mind and body. This alienating effect, together with the romantic and existential themes that seem out of place today, evokes ‘lost’ feelings of loneliness, detachment and melancholy. This is what sets Chafes apart as one of the most pertinent sculptors working today.