Sculpture is central to the work of Francisco Tropa. Since the beginning of his artistic practice in the early 1990s, his work has gained much attention from institutions and critics, notably, in 2011, when he represented Portugal in the Venice Biennale. In the work of Tropa, several media – including sculpture, drawing, performance, photography, and film – convene in a series of reflections and are introduced by the different traditions of sculpture. Subjects such as body, death, nature, landscape, memory, origin, and time are always present in his works and are characterized by an endless process of projecting references from art history, influences from other art works or previous works of the artist, or literature. A constant vein of research in the artist’s practice, the ‘Lanterns’ series takes up the theme of the shadow theater, the allegory of the cave, and early motion-picture experiences. With an extreme level of formal and technical sophistication, Pharmacie (2019) suggests an allegory reuniting three archaic instruments for measuring time: the clepsydra water clock, the hourglass, and the mechanical clock.
