Artist's Resumé
The work of Noe Sendas has its roots in drawing, from the use of drawing as a means of establishing a thought in visible form. From this, and through his interest in the cinema, he defines new spheres in which images are used. These images are frequently drawn from the world of cinema, at other times the artist himself films them. In either case they always become images collected by him, at firs or secondhand, creating a new authorship, which comes out in the handling of a reworked context. The work of Noe Sendas never starts from the idea of taking possession of something. We are not dealing with a question of ownership or appropriation but re-use, of putting a form together, a new split from a crack, which already exists.
We can say that this specific way of using images stems from the practice of drawing, from the fluidity of drawing as warp and weave. It also stems from the cross between drawing as the possibility of sensing the body as motion and editing as the nature of the artistic process.
From 1996, Noe sendas began to use video images, exerts from films, sometimes recognizable, at other times totally obscured, reworked so that they would build new forms which are utterly independent from the sources which were their raw material.
These works included from the outset sophisticated sound tracks, made from fragments of text, and sound from a number of sources. The flows of sound were perfectly dovetailed with images. They were fragments of Deleuze and Beckett, the strains of Coltrane and snippets of dialogues from Antonionni or Fellini films cross-linked with Godard. The resultant fabric is not based on the notion of collage but rather on a more fluent, more absorbent model, something like the strategy of a DJ.
This method of bringing the work to the public makes the artist a kind of sampler, someone who uses sight and sound, whatever its source, to set up a relationship through flux. Noe Senda's model is therefore not a collage, because his not interested in postulating a discourse on the seams, which he produces. He is not interested in setting up a critical ideology on quotations as a mechanism or a process. This is not the model of a project, which serves as a counterpoint to expression; it is another less dualistic model. This is the model of an embodied flow.
This strategy operates in harmony with Deleuzian references in Noe Sendas. It has recently come to include the puncturing of space through the inclusion of individuals, mannequins with bodily proportions of the artist himself, reawakening the question of presence through doubt about the possibility of presence. In perceptive terms these doubles are hyper-realistic, credibly dressed in real clothing, but they are faceless, almost pure bodily models to the scale of the spectator on a one-two-one reality relationship.
In fact, these characters define a theatrical concept: They are waiting, and they awaken memories of Beckett, building around them what we could call the exhibition space converted by their very specific nature into real space.
There is thus a three-fold relationship in the work of Noe Sendas. From his inventory of perception as the construct of a phenomenology of the body, Sendas builds a flux of sampled references. This flux of samples which is reworked by the artist into a unified body activates the theatrical device of presence, transforming exhibition space into a space where the beholder finds, as a "presence" the scale of his own body.