Tragedy arises when two truths collide. There are no innocents. It affirms life even in the face of torment and presents us with one of the many possible realities of our existence. Of the many narratives told throughout history, Greek mythology brings together plots that highlight the importance of this clash, a moment of transition that occurs before rebirth. An intermediate space, in which its characters, imbued with an often painful certainty of destiny, cover part of their bodies, mostly their faces, in a look at their own inner world. The face, in mythology, is the public presence, it is through it that identity and belonging are recognized. When multidisciplinary artist Nino Cais covers them with different materials, from books to packaging, thus removing their protagonism, he also questions the identity role of man and places them in the shadows of this passage between worlds. He suspends recognition, interrupts the gaze of the other, and begins the dissolution of their individual social bonds.

The veil, whatever form it may take, places these characters in processes of a moment that modern anthropology, defined mainly by Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957), calls liminal. A fertile, dangerous, and often unstable period of reintegration, when we enter a time when our identities are suspended. In this way, the veil functions as a symbiotic membrane that creates the opacity necessary to cross and transform the body. In the visible world, Cais expands our thinking. Beyond the meticulously refined faces in different formats, he also subtracts in other works distinct parts of the body and imposing architectural structures from human history, playing with the volume of these forms and bringing to the fore the discussion about the image in focus and the image on the blade present on the paper not being merely two-dimensional—but rather three-dimensional, since they contain the object itself. Thus, Cais produces a kind of depilation of the image, removing its impression. He replicates in this material a traditional method of sculpture, which is the act of carving. In this way, he redraws sculptural thinking in other directions.

Greek bodies and constructions reappear in the works, still damaged by time or by the very people who occupied those territories, certain that by breaking them, they would free the souls of these mythological characters. Cais’s specific interventions create other possible landscapes, as well as new forms of communication with our ancestral culture. It is as if, through the artist’s interference in a constant dialogue with them, such scenes and bodies regain their spirit, amplifying the meaning already present in their history.

Transfiguring and constructing new allegories from books, images, and given scenes is a recurring theme in his work, which uses different media, supports, and languages linked to literature, theater, and the visual arts. This reconfiguration appears in a powerful development gathered in the outer room of the Lume gallery. The space, facing a small garden, is transformed into a kind of nursery for fantastic animals in the midst of transmutation. Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), one of the great masters to work with the idea in a subjective and complex way, has, in his Maiastra series, one of his points of contact with Cais’ current creations. The name comes from a mythical bird in Romanian folklore, the Pasărea Măiastră, a magical bird associated with light, ascension, and metamorphosis. In Brancusi’s ideal, however, the maiastra is not a bird per se, but the idea of flight. Of an enchanted being that walks between animal and spirit, figure and abstraction, matter and luminescence. Nino Cais flies over this idea by linking it to tangram. Following the proposed geometry, the artist creates new forms through the fragmentation and recomposition of the seven pieces that make up the game of Chinese origin. The birds that emerge show that no fraction loses its identity, but its meaning changes according to its position. On the floor of the space, it is possible to see the beginning of this metamorphosis. Using covers from old books, mostly Egyptian and Greek mythology, Cais brings other beings to life. A clear dialogue with the neo-concrete movement that discusses the object as an experience, removing it from static spatiality and leading to reflection on its relationship with organisms.

By tensioning presence and erasure, volume and surface, Nino Cais places us before an essentially liminal condition: neither full image nor definitive ruin; neither intact body nor inert fragment. His works inhabit the interval—that territory where identity is suspended in order to reconfigure itself. Between the gesture of veiling and that of revealing, between stripping away and recomposing, the artist invites us to traverse the possibility of reinventing the gaze — as if, by touching these presences in transit, we were also summoned to be reborn in a new idea of flight.

Ana Carolina Ralston
Curator