FORM AND AUSTERITYMadame Récamier segundo David is a sculpture with a clearly defined past indicated in its title: the heir to a painting by David, dating from 1800, by Jeanne-Françoise Julie Adélaïde Bernard Récamier, the epitome of beauty, literary refinement and intellectual independence; in short, the femme du monde who survived, in her vicissitudes, the Revolution and Bonapartism. The portrait by David (the painter of Napoleon, a dubious, virtuoso creature) came two years before the portrait of Madame Récamier painted by Gérard and much longer before the versions in painting (in 1957) and in sculpture (ten years later) by Magritte, and also had come before La grande odalisque by Ingres. It is a painting that marks out a period, a style and an ideology. Madame Récamier is lying on an empire divan, wearing that neo-classical version of a dress that spread pneumonia in Napoleon’s court. Rui Sanches’s sculpture is a volumetric and de-eroticised conversion of the portrait, with the attention concentrated on understanding the compositional mechanism of the painting, converted into an analytical construction, poor in materials and neo-classical in its construction. Rui Sanches chose a very curious and strange path for his sculpture since the eighties; he took neo-classicism as his working field and transformed rigour of composition into poor, structural construction, bringing together a sculptural language coming from the avant-gardes of the first half of the century and an interest in its exact opposite, the formalism of the neoclassical universe. This union brought about a thesis on form, a rereading of the anti-ethical universes that served it as tools and material, a synthesis between an austerity of material (worn pine wood, sometimes the supreme irony of bronze painted white) and the Napoleonic and imperial reference of his models. This duplicity would open up a path to a work that would increasingly move towards a theory of form, then to a deliberate articulation of historical references through a theory of volume taken as the essential component of sculpture.Mariana Viterbo Brandão