João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva

This book accompanies Ikon's exhibition by artists Pavia and Gusmão, the exhibition has been developed alongside the publication. The book is built around three central texts that also offer the starting point for the artists’ new work.

First is a selection of poetry by Alberto Caeiro, an alter ego or heteronym of arguably the greatest Portuguese writer of the 20th Century Fernando Pessoa. Writing in a simple, direct manner, Caeiro sees the world around him purely as it is; he does not offer interpretative judgment or metaphor, and avoids any uncertainties, clinging instead to the belief that there is no meaning behind things.

The second text is an excerpt from the Kabbalah tradition that looks at the concept of Tzimtzum, a story telling the process of creation. It says that the universe was begun by a contraction of God in His infinity, in order to create a finite space in which a world could exist.

Again, ideas of infinity are considered in the artists’ third choice, a few fragments from Pensées by the French mathematician and philosopher Pascal. Here Pascal surveys several philosophical paradoxes including infinity and nothing, faith and reason, soul and matter, death and life, meaning and vanity, but the selection focuses specifically on ‘Pascal's Wager’.