by Stephanie Wruck | Nov 10, 2021 | new artist
DISPLACEMENT
Osias André, from Mozambique, immigrated to Portugal 4 years ago where he won 3 scholarships from the independent art school Ar.Co, an institution dedicated to experimentation and artistic training. Osias started painting at the age of 8 and began his artistic career through graphic illustration, producing a collection of books. For him, painting demands a slower and more indirect digestion. In the painting works exhibited here, one can notice a search for identity, linked to their African origins, through a traditional European studio practice. The result is striking paintings, in which colors, shapes and contents act in balance, appropriating Western pictorial practice to bring to light elements arising from African cultural resistance to centuries of Eurocentrist hegemony. Osias lives and works in Lisbon.
- The displacement of classic Euro-centric pictorial compositions into new environments;
- Manipulation of colors and shapes;
- Strengthening their own identity, distancing themselves from home;
- Balance between African diaspora sensibilities and European preoccupation with theory and reason.
by Stephanie Wruck | Nov 10, 2021 | new artist
IMPERMANENCE
Eduardo Dias is a biologist from São Paulo, Brazil, and currently works at Mackenzie Presbyterian University as a Laboratory Technician at the Biosciences Research Center. His work takes him to Brazilian biomes such as the Pantanal, the Cerrado, the Atlantic Forest, among many other destinations, and photography plays an important role during his travels. He uses it as a tool to give vent to his imagination, but also as a means to create a didactic repertoire in which his knowledge of biology unites with art. Its objective is to show the beauty of nature through sensitive images, exalting its organic structures and singularities. For Eduardo, this union of forces between art and biology is a way of alerting us about the environment we inhabit and everything that lives around us.
- Capture landscapes and species as a warning about the imminent threat to nature;
- Demystify ideas about the natural world by praising the beauties of its reality;
- Reduce the distance between people and their environment.
by Stephanie Wruck | Nov 10, 2021 | new artist
IMPERMANENCE
Gabriela Albuquerque is a Brazilian artist who lives and works in Cascais. His current research focuses on recurring landscapes and developments beyond the academic historical tradition of this genre. The almost compulsive repetition of images seeks to exalt the paradox between permanence and impermanence of our surroundings, of what is familiar to us, but also ephemeral. The option for oil paintings, which follow a centuries-old tradition, questions the continuity of certain practices that resist despite constant innovations. More than records of moments and places, they are also an attempt – perhaps frustrated – to make permanent what is ephemeral. The works shown here reinforce the idea that we are transitory, not the spaces we occupy.
- Landscapes watch us, not the other way around;
- Natural landscapes serving as reminders of human impermanence.
by Stephanie Wruck | Nov 10, 2021 | new artist
DOCUMENTATION
Martim Meirelles is an American photographer who lives and works in New York. Of Portuguese descent, Martim travels between the USA, Portugal and Mozambique. His photographic research documents human lives that live on the margins of economic prosperity and share a common Portuguese language background. His work focuses on beauty, pain and joy, highlighting the artist's ability to approach each subject with a profound visual sensitivity. The photographs presented here are the result of a one-year stay at the Madre Maria Clara orphanage in Mozambique in 2017 and also of an artistic residency in Nazaré in 2014.
- Documentation of lives and traditions;
- Exposition of the human condition.
by Stephanie Wruck | Nov 10, 2021 | new artist
TERRITORY
Juliana Matsumura is Brazilian and currently lives in Lisbon. He graduated in Design at Escola Ar.Co, and attended the Graduation in Textiles and Fashion at USP. The artist is a member of Risco Coletivo, a collective of contemporary design practices. Drawing is his main means of expression and to carry it out he appropriates various tools such as engraving, photography and painting. The series presented here is part of his work “Memories of Water”, which addresses the closest contact with his Japanese ancestry and his trajectory as a Brazilian immigrant in Lusitanian lands. The unknown quality of foreign territories is exposed through diffuse tones like dark spots. The shapes are reminiscent of blurred memories that merge with the expectations that come with the migration process. Juliana is capable of architecting new territories where the weight of ancestry and the novelty arising from new experiences are simultaneously present.
- Rivers that lead to shared territories while carrying memories of a lost ancestry;
- The flow of water is responsible for altering its surroundings.
by Stephanie Wruck | Nov 10, 2021 | new artist
Displacement
Natália Loyola has a degree in Social Communication and Journalism and is studying a master's degree in Anthropology – Visual Cultures at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. His research focuses on the exercise of observation of places where he circulates, especially within urban landscapes. His photographs function as an imagery construction of territorial markers of his own migratory process, all seen in his interactions with the city itself and its inhabitants. Natália's sensitive perception starts from dualities such as: movement vs. quietude; nomad vs. sedentary; real vs. imagery and evokes a sense of familiarity with the themes of each image. The works presented reflect the artist's study of displacement as an exercise in body criticism. Natália lives in Almada and works around the world.
- Walking as a critical corporal practice;
- The exercise of making a place from everyday life;
- Mapping imaginary fields through the appropriation of physical spaces.
