Pedro Diniz Reis: Epitaph

One night and presented by Hugo Canoilas

Pedro Diniz Reis
Born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1972.
1995-2000 Graduate degree in Fine Arts – Painting at the Fine Arts University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal.
Lives and works in Lisbon.

Since the beginning of his artistic trajectory at the end of the 1990s, Pedro Diniz Reis (Lisbon, 1972) has mainly used video in his work, together with occasional experiments with other media, such as photography, performance and sound. His videos are the result of an extremely painstaking process, in which his irrepressible mastery and experimentation with the resources offered by this medium are allied to an obsessive formal rigour, enveloping the spectator in an intense sensory experience. Many of these works are made of images and sounds extracted from films and music videos, organised into non-narrative visual and sound compositions and sequences. Since 2004, has produced a remarkable group of works in which he makes use of certain linguistic signs – different alphabets, all the words of an English dictionary, the numbers from 0 to 9 spoken in Japanese – as abstract material, as pure signifiers, applying rules for the combination and sequencing of the different elements in order to construct sound and/or visual compositions that draw the spectator into a deeply immersive sensory experience. This group of works were previously shown in an exhibition at Culturgest in Porto, A dictionary, four alphabets and a decimal system, in November 2010. This exhibition had consequences that were as unexpected as they were crucial in his artistic activity, opening up a whole new field of creative possibilities, which were widely explored in two works presented in parallel: The Book of A’s and the performance 6489 A’s for prepared piano. Composed of three pieces in different mediums (video, sound and book), this second exhibition of Pedro Diniz Reis at Culturgest expresses a moment of remarkable creative combustion in his work.