CURRENT EXHIBITION - NUNO NUNES-FERREIRA

A CUCA AJUDA A UPA, A NOCAL AJUDA PORTUGAL!
11 NOV TO 19 DEC 2015

 
 

The exhibition of Nuno Nunes Ferreira is entitled A CUCA AJUDA A UPA,  A NOCAL AJUDA PORTUGAL!, a slogan that has political overtones and recovers the memory of the colonial war fought in the former Portuguese colonies, more specifically in Angola. The exhibition project reveals a powerful unity in the elements that comprise each of the works, due to their use as the source for the self-referential nature of his research.

The artist is referring here mainly to the period when his father fought in the Overseas War, and to the memories, objects, stories and silences that the latter transmitted to him once he had returned to civilian life. Cuca and Nocal (1) were the beers that people drank in their moments of rest and relaxation, still anxious times, but away from the actual fighting.

The overseas universe that the artist works upon, pursuing his practice as a methodical and compulsive archivist, opens up various fields of questioning about the memories of Africa, more precisely Angola. In his artistic practice, the artist collects documents and artefacts that are closely linked both to the liberation movements and to the demagogical propaganda of Salazar’s regime. These include publications that resisted events and contributed to the breakup of this regime, which affected our identity as a defunct empire and the identity of all those who, having been born in Portugal or the ex-colonies, arrived in Portugal as “retornados” (literally returnees, but people who also referred to themselves as the “dispossessed from the ex-colonies”). They were returning from a land that, while it belonged to everyone (all the citizens of the empire), did not, however, belong to those who had occupied and ruled it for several centuries.

Emanating from one of the works is a buzzing sound that is transformed into a military march: “Angola… É Nossa”. Words that are sung by men without their utopia, hostages from a time that did not know the meaning of Freedom, a concept that, still today, has not yet achieved its full legitimacy.

(1)  Cuca was brewed by a company that was a subsidiary of the Portuguese Central de Cervejas, while Nocal was produced by the Angolan Nova Empresa de Cervejas.

João Silvério

CURRENT EXHIBITION - MÁRIO RITA

LES VOYEURS
24 SEP TO 24 OCT 2015

 
 

Drawing has always been of fundamental importance in my work. Making a graphic record helps me to manage and structure the whole composition. Drawing, together with the use of painting materials, not only makes the figurative presences appear, but also allows them to be cancelled out and to reappear. Drawing ensures the management of the space, opening new paths that allow the pictorial matter to assert itself. This symbiosis manages events by building the pictorial text. This doing and undoing forms the substance of the painting itself, until it reveals itself and surprises me. 

Mário Rita

PROJECT ROOM - CARLOS CORREIA

LIVRO / BARCO / REVOLUÇÃO
18 JUN TO 31 JUL 2015

 
 

[...]

Painting is a visible body, one that is palpable and requires a physical presence. However, it has also been able to relate to and call upon other forms of production, not only of images, but also of critical discourse. Without having abandoned the theoretical and practical presuppositions that are based on its materiality, it seems to me that, nowadays, these open themselves up to wide range of possibilities.

[…]

History repeats itself, images too, with minor adjustments. 

La Liberté Guidant le Peuple vs. Arab Spring / Occupy Wall Street
Le Radeau de la Meduse vs. immigration routes on overcrowded boats 

What unites and what separates the representation of an event mediated by art (the paintings of Géricault and Delacroix, separated from the observer by the frame that is imposed by the museum) and the cruder representation of an event mediated by the news channels: the illusion that we are witnessing everything live, as if we were in the place itself, is nothing more than this, an illusion. The separation between event and spectator also has a place here, no longer being effected through the frame and the sense of security that are provided by the museum, but instead through the television screen and the four walls of our home. 

In LIVRO / BARCO / REVOLUÇÃO, I have brought to the work table the painting of history, the history of painting, and fragments of the contemporary world. I have added the presence of the spectator. And I have imagined a history with painting inside.

Carlos Correia

CURRENT EXHIBITION - MIGUEL NAVAS

PAISAGENS DE ERROS II_DE BUCHENWALD A ROBBEN ISLAND
18 JUN TO 31 JUL 2015

“No creo en un Arte panfletário,
Pero creo que el Hombre se duerme, Y mientras duerme,
Se despiertan los monstruos.”

Anónimo Espanhol, séc. XX

Some time ago, my attention was caught by an image of the concentration camp at Buchenwald, in Germany, which was published in the Público newspaper [...]. A few months later, I read in the same newspaper that hundreds of thousands of Jews were abandoning Europe and heading for Israel, as the resurgence of anti-Semitism did not guarantee them the necessary conditions of security and freedom... This series of “Paisagens de Erros” is a reaction to this and other realities (racism, walls, certain political prisons) which had seemed controlled, only appearing on specific occasions, but which then began to grow in an irrational fashion from day to day. As was said in Anna Karenina: “That's what reason is given to man for, to escape from what worries him.” In the case of these paintings on paper that I present here, such worries are revealed in the aggressiveness and/or the restraint of the gestures. The results vary from case to case, depending on what each situation arouses in me. 

Miguel Navas