UPCOMING - EXHIBITION

ANA TECEDEIRO
JAN 2016

Não Sejas Desmanchas Prazeres II
Paper Stapled on MDF Panel
60 x 120 cm
2013

Memory is one of the central features in the work of Ana Tecedeiro, which is built upon numerous registers that involve and evoke everyday life. This collection or appropriation of registers reminds us of a child’s gaze – attentive, curious and devoid of any attempt at resistance. Although this gaze may seem ingenuous, it is filled with a profound meaningfulness, directing our attention to places and past experiences, while still retaining the power to reformulate them.

Her work has great versatility, not only in technical terms, adopting different approaches, such as an extraordinary coherence of form and concept.

The appropriation is clear both in her two-dimensional works (in which the introduction of certain elements provokes a carefully considered reconstruction that subverts the purely visual and pre-acquired elements), and in her three-dimensional constructions (in which Ana Tecedeiro concentrates, circumscribes and deposits objects, among small wooden cubicles or boxes). These objects then take on their own life, concentrating in themselves reminiscences of a past in which the spectator can see himself reflected and revisit himself, while at the same time reconstructing the different spaces and concentrating them into one single space.

Tiago Mourão

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