PARTE DO CHÃO

Texto de Carlota Bóia Neto

Between valleys and ridges that embrace the Côa River, time shapes the landscape. Its authority imposes itself, inviting those who pass through to contemplate its imponence: a distant yet close time, traversed by people from a past that is ours.

This is the landscape that unfolds and fragments into a graphic language that unites the work here presented, between the appropriation of poetic text and a graphic style, distinctive, and simultaneously shared among the artists. This is not necessarily a premeditated or structured process, after all, memory architects thoughts, images, sounds, shadows… in unknown ways. A landscape of another nature then emerges: an inner landscape.

In João Massano’s work, references to these landscapes are evident; the planes of the landscape merge and dissolve, invoking in the viewer an in-between place: a space that is both real and dreamlike.

In Maria Luísa Capela’s practice, the marked gesturality of the stroke inhabits her rhythmic, mobile paintings, referring back to the primordial mechanisms of painting: a rough, raw, sensitive plasticity.

Sebastião Castelo Lopes presents a Beckettian^[1] approach to time, in which the reference to symbols asserts itself poetically: the bone associated with the word. The bone emerges as a signifier, carrying multiple meanings through the lyrical and enigmatic relationship it establishes with the text.

Guided by references and appropriations of what lies beyond the museum’s walls, the exhibition invites the viewer to reflect upon the relationships enacted through drawing. Time exercises its agency: it eternalizes the experiences, stories, and dreams of those who have passed through here. Now we are the ones passing through, in another score of that same composition.

 

^[1] Reference to Samuel Beckett.