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.