The Pond Skater

Luís Lázaro Matos’ impressively multifaceted practice encompasses drawing and painting, ceramics, architecture, animation, fiction and music, resulting in performances, concerts and immersive installations. For Lázaro Matos, an all-encompassing experience that is distinct from reality can offer a clear, critical perspective of the quotidian we usually occupy. Thus invited to be protagonists themselves, viewers must choose where to focus their attention among competing sensory inputs. In that sense Lázaro Matos’ publication The Pond Skater occupies uncertain territory too, refracting and ensnaring the reader’s attention. The work offers a linear narrative, the fable of an insect and its encounter with a magpie and a snake. The Pond Skater observes the creatures around it, aloof and critical, but is entranced by a book the avaricious magpie drops in the pond; it can only observe it from afar until the snake unexpectedly and generously takes it to the bottom of the water. The tale floats over a background collated from works, installation shots and graphic shapes. The specifically located – though fantastical – story is untethered amid planes of different depth and feasibility. In a conversation between Lázaro Matos, João Mourão and Luís Silva that accompanies the publication, the artist speaks in terms of interlinked works that function like actors on a stage, speaking individually but in chorus.