Sun (mandarins) deceptively takes on a familiar citrus fruit: a mandarin. Here, that ubiquitous healthy snack formally captures the luminous star in our palm’s hand – the mirage of anthropocentric control. Suddenly, the mirage morphs into delusion, hallucination, illusion and burning truth as recycled aluminium-made mandarins punctuate the space in dialogue.

Now, the sounds percolate into a visual world of inner landscape drawings depicting the artist’s internal weather while listening to the sun’s voice for a long period of time. This is Radioastronomy (here comes the Sun). Look at the Sun (not with the naked eye!): it’s vital. Its gravity holds our planetary system together. Its energy brings heat, warmth, life in blooming crops, allows us to see in colours of rainbow and can burn to ashes, silently and invisibly. This much we know today. But, can we hear the Sun? Are we really listening? I know you can see it. Listen now.

In Two Suns the faint tenuous solar corona takes centre stage as a painting turns into installation in red, orange, and charcoal hues. The scene highlights the scale of the sun’s magnetic fields and invites us to touch a mandarin above the horizon, posing as cosmic latte (the average colour of the universe found by a team of astronomers). This playful mandarin literally casts a dark reminder of the catastrophic effect of the heat in the age of the anthropocene: burned and destroyed agricultural crops in ash-like aluminium, the most abundant metal on Earth’s crust.

And, have you ever seen a nebula that looks like a number? 37 Cluster lends itself to possible comments on absurdity, although the source material for this piece is retrieved from a scientific magazine. A dry spray painting on aluminium presents the contradiction of making sense of a group of stars by ‘discovering’ the number 37 written in the deep sky. Is this for real, would you believe it?

-- Inês Rebelo
inesrebelo.info

Sun (mandarins), 2019
recycled aluminium, 3.8cm x 4.8cm x 5.2cm (each), set of 3

Radioastronomy (here comes the Sun), 2018
Felt-tip permanent pen and laserjet colour print drawings on fine grain 250gsm paper, 29.7 x 42 cm (each), set of 12

Two Suns, 2023
Enamel on aluminium, steel, jute bags and commuter newspapers, dimensions variable

37 Cluster, 2009
Enamel on aluminium, 55x57cm

Star*ts | Cultures of Sound

Weekdays 10:00-15:00
Saturday 11:00-16:00

Drop in during café opening hours or by appointment to meet the artist or have a curator tour

Bath House Galleries . University of Huddersfield . Queensgate . Huddersfield . HD1 3DH