The drawings and sculptures of David Correia Gonçalves develop as an enquiry into the experience of the body. In his work, drawing and sculpture are two different forms of artistic expression governed by similar practices and methodologies, such as the physicality with which he carries out the graphite drawings, the modulation of clay and its connection to industrially produced materials and objects, or to fragments of objects of a high degree of hardness, and sometimes the joining of drawing and sculpture in the same work. (…)

When we look at Correia Gonçalves' drawings, we are immediately affected by a mass and a haptic density that appeals to our body in the inscription of the body of the artist. This duplicity between bodily relationships subjects us to an idea of ​​movement, whether in the densely crafted large-scale graphite bar drawings or in the books/sculptures that the artist has been developing in recent years. These books come in a variety of formats, from pocket size to medium format, and a book with the size of a human body, the artist's body, which is being carved, built, in a work process as a work in progress that will integrate some of the drawings that are present in this exhibition . It is in this transforming process that folding, cutting, collage, creasing, and binding summon us to an idea of ​​a library, and thus to an idea of ​​temporality. (…)

Let us observe the sculptures/drawings in the tension and transitoriness of the body that confronts them. Their perenniality is associated with sculpture, but their morphology is like a paradox, between the delicacy of the drawing and the mineral density, sometimes of an iron hue.

João Silvério, March 2022