Portfolio — Selected projects
Flávio Rodrigues (1984, Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal)
performer and visual artist
Artist statement — Flávio Rodrigues
My practice moves at the intersection of body, matter, and landscape. Through minimal actions and analogue processes, I explore how presence can shift, dissolve, or leave traces that outlive the gesture itself. Walking is often my first tool: a way of sensing territories, gathering fragments, and listening to the subtle materials that shape each work. From these encounters emerge performances, drawings, installations, and sculptural dispositifs that operate between ritual and experiment.
I am interested in the body not as spectacle, but as an instrument of attention — a catalyst that activates objects, spaces, and temporalities. Many of my works begin with simple actions: lifting, carrying, erasing, placing, disappearing. These gestures open a space where fragility and resilience coexist, where the visible slips into the invisible, and where the object sometimes remains as the survivor of the performance.
Rooted in performance art yet expanded across media, my work searches for an ethics of relation — between the human body and the environments it crosses, gathers from, or becomes absorbed into. What persists, what vanishes, and what is transformed in the process are questions that guide my ongoing artistic research.
I. Performance actions
The body as instrument and event
This section gathers images of my performance work, where the body appears as the central medium of action, attention, and transformation. These performances operate through minimal gestures, slow temporalities, and a physical presence that activates space and material. The photographs serve not as documentation alone, but as extensions of the event — fragments of a living moment where the body shapes, and is shaped by, the encounter.
II. Installative remnants
Objects that hold the echo of action
Here, the works presented originate from or are generated through performance. These installations, sculptural dispositifs, and material arrangements remain after the gesture, functioning as witnesses and residues of the performative act. Detached from the immediacy of the body, they inhabit a quieter temporal field, where matter carries memory, tension, and the implicit choreography of what has occurred.
III. Drawings & isolated experiments
Territories without a witness
This final section includes drawings, material studies, and experimental forms developed outside the presence of an audience. These works exist autonomously, emerging from processes of walking, collecting, observing, or repetitive manual gestures. Without the performative body in direct view, they reveal another dimension of my practice: intimate, exploratory, and attentive to the subtle dialogues between line, surface, and the traces of thought.
