The sculptor work of Filipe Curado “The Box” (55cm x 50cm x 40cm, marble) at the entrance of Nova Ogiva Gallery, serves as motto for the dialogue between the other exhibition works. Curado’s half opened box, modeled in marble, reveals, on the one hand, the originality on the material treatment, but it also inspires stories with secrets and multiply narratives, experiences that each artist has gone through and that in a peculiar and subjective way are, here, transmitted through their eyes, through the analysis of the curator and through the public who looks, observes and sees and in their turn build their own stories.

The Box exhibition – Belmira Seco art work – text by Genoveva Oliveira

Março 25, 2013Genoveva Oliveira

Belmira Seco materializes through “A contextualização da mulher através dos mitos” (The contextualization of women through the myths) [application on fabric, natural linen support and several colored fabrics, 1,78 height X 2,41) a memory of the Portuguese identity, our African legacy, present in our culture. Angolan, but with wide experience in Portugal, Belmira reveals the enormous power of Mother Earth, the mythology which involves the baobab tree, considered to be a sacred tree that inspires poetries, rites and legends.

The Box exhibition – Isabel Lima art work – text by Genoveva Oliveira

Março 25, 2013Março 25, 2013Genoveva Oliveira

The Box exhibition – Paulo Canilhas art work – text by Genoveva Oliveira

Março 25, 2013Março 25, 2013Genoveva Oliveira

The individuality is present in the work of Paulo Canilhas “SINTO-ME… confuso / preso/ digital / mecânico / em mudança”. (I FEEL… confused / trapped/ digital / mechanic /I’m changing”. [70x46cm, Photographic composition – Digital printing glued on PVC), in which he tells a story of his personal life and which impels us, spectators, to our free interpretation. As a curator I see myself in this “invisible” story of Canilhas, where I find the representation of an individual identity, but transnational, in a troubled period as today, in which the days are filled with interrogations and the uncertainty guides the chosen paths. Paulo does not consider this work finished, just as no story of a human-being is.

The Box exhibition – Nelson Crespo art work – text by Genoveva Oliveira

Março 25, 2013Genoveva Oliveira

The Nelson Crespo art work “Passaporte Português” (Portuguese Passport) [Woodcut, Serigraph and oil on paper, 200 x 90cm] the passport has been enlarged to poster/Billboard scale, translates the wish to increase the idea of national identity. Nelson lives in London and this experience out of Portugal influenced the search for the theme for this three year project: “The references which one has, when living far from the home country, are distorted and romanticized. On the other hand, they may also contain feelings of denial or of exile.” The visible date on the stamp (August 23, 1985) of Vilar Formoso’s border post reminds us, on the one hand, of a summer period and of a huge influx of emigrants, on the other hand, the year before Portugal’s entry to the EU (January 1, 1986) and with it the access to free movement.

The Box exhibition at Nova Ogiva art gallery, Óbidos – Teresa Mendonça art work – text by Genoveva Oliveira

Março 25, 2013Março 25, 2013Genoveva Oliveira

The polychromatic facet of Teresa Mendonça in “Encontros Ocasionais” (Técnica mista sobre tela, 80X110 ) [Occasional Encounters, mixed technique on canvas, 80X110] and “Histórias de outras dimensões III” (Técnica mista sobre tela, 90X120) [Stories of other dimensions III, mixed technique on canvas 90X120] reveals her individuality as a woman and as an artist, achieved from learning systems, but also from the way she feels painting, with space, color and light intimacy, existing a constant concern in rethinking the art and the artistic remake. Teresa states: “My plastic language is marked by originality through a game of allusions, occultations and associations apparently with no link, that calls for the existential experience of the observer, dragging him to challenges that I desire to face, as if he was part of the world there proposed.”

The Box exhibition – Carla Cruz art work – text by Genoveva Oliveira

Março 25, 2013Março 26, 2013Genoveva Oliveira

The photographs of Carla Cruz’s “Maintenance Art: Homage to Mierle Laderman Ukeles” performance and the serigraphy “Conjugar no Plural” (Conjugate in Plural), intensify, once more, the feminine position. In the first work, Cruz, in tribute to Ukeles, the north American artist who brought domestic to public space, by cleaning the museum, gives visibility to the cleaning team. The performance was held in Guimarães, in the space managed by artists, the Laboratory of Arts. The space was going to close, it was thought then that it was going to be demolished. The exhibition for which the performance “27 artistas uma casa para demolir” (27 artists a house to demolish) was conceived emphasizes this situation. Cruz refers “I wanted to make a performance that would be rather absurd, clean a space that would disappear. By doing it something happened, the space that I cleaned in contrast with the rest of the floor became a kind of centre under a spot, as if it had not been cleaned, but lit.”

Carla Cruz’s work “Conjugar no Plural” (Conjugate in Plural), a collaboration with Oficina Arara, having Dayana Lucas, for the design and printing of the poster, resulted from a very specific invitation of the exhibition’s “Para Além das Palavras” 2012 (Beyond Words 2012) Carla Cruz’s work “Conjugar no Plural” (Conjugate in Plural), a collaboration with Oficina Arara, having Dayana Lucas, for the design and printing of the poster, resulted from a very specific invitation of the exhibition’s “Para Além das Palavras” 2012 (Beyond Words 2012) curators, Campaign Space, which was to work out from the book “Novas Cartas Portuguesas” (New Portuguese Letters) of 1972 by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa. But this work is also a tribute to all artists who participated in “All My Independent Women” project, developed since 2005.

The Box, Nova Ogiva Art Gallery, Óbidos, Portugal – catalogue full text from Genoveva Oliveira

Março 25, 2013Genoveva Oliveira

Óbidos Art Challenge/The Box

The Box opens the possibilities for a process in construction which involves narratives of several artists using different poetics and production processes such as Sculpture, Painting, Installation, Video, Woodcut, Photography and Tapestry. The artists, men and women invited to dialogue in different ways about the holistic vision of art and to reflect on the human-being as a whole being, with an identity. Included in the research project “No Silence”, The Box is the second of a number of exhibitions with Portuguese and foreign artists which is being developed in Portugal (Oliveira, 2012).

What is it to be Portuguese? It is this desire of belonging to a community, a social, cultural and historic construction, which materializes through the Portuguese language, the flavors, the aromas, the family stories throughout the centuries, of tears and laughters of men and women, of smiles and half-smiles or still one other story that one builds on that long Atlantic coast, an immense and ancestral built and natural heritage.

To be a citizen is to develop and assume oneself as a person of full possibilities. But the contemporary society claims for new speeches, new visions. There is a symbolic redefinition of knowledge disseminated in everyday life; there is a new dynamic of space-time comprehension of the contemporary world. There is a growing instability of the subjectivities and of the modern identities, along with a greater emergency desire for volunteer intercultural contacts or not. The real concerns and the relevant problems of today’s society such as the gender issues, the psychological and physical violence of a global world, emerge and materialize in the artists’ works in distinctive ways leading publics to, more than look, to observe and to reflect.

Today, the cultural studies continue with the affirmation of multiculturalism, focusing on the study of the different cultural aspects and establishing the dialogue with other disciplines, such as, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, History of Art and Ethnography. This new way of thinking reflects the social and economic change, a new order in the West encouraged with the communication development, economy globalization, Americanization of the cultures and computer technology (Neves, 2009). Despite all that, that apparent homogeneity, people claim for their individuality, ethnicity and cultural legacies. This is the acknowledgment of cultural pluralism. The new concepts, focused on the difference while general concept and on the racial difference, lead the artist to become an actor and an observer, a reader of the artistic production. There isn’t one only meaning, but several, being all valid (Bhabha, 1994).
The sculptor work of Filipe Curado “The Box” (55cm x 50cm x 40cm, marble) at the entrance of Nova Ogiva Gallery, serves as motto for the dialogue between the other exhibition works. Curado’s half opened box, modeled in marble, reveals, on the one hand, the originality on the material treatment, but it also inspires stories with secrets and multiply narratives, experiences that each artist has gone through and that in a peculiar and subjective way are, here, transmitted through their eyes, through the analysis of the curator and through the public who looks, observes and sees and in their turn build their own stories.

Curado presents other works in this exhibition which raises different dialogues. The “Nu” (Nude) [150cm x 40cm x 40cm, marble] reveals the perfection and imperfection of a feminine body and the different meanings of the body while symbolic image of a Portuguese and global story, full of social and cultural codes. But it is through the work “Ovelha Negra” (Black Sheep) [57cm x 28cm x 10cm, marble] that Curado reports the individuality and the identity of the human-being which does not present itself as different, but as a unique being. This piece dialogues with the work of Nelson Crespo “Passaporte Português” (Portuguese Passport) [Woodcut, Serigraph and oil on paper, 200 x 90cm] which, in the words of the artist, by the fact that the passport has been enlarged to poster/Billboard scale, translates the wish to increase the idea of national identity. Nelson lives in London and this experience out of Portugal influenced the search for the theme for this three year project: “The references which one has, when living far from the home country, are distorted and romanticized. On the other hand, they may also contain feelings of denial or of exile.” The visible date on the stamp (August 23, 1985) of Vilar Formoso’s border post reminds us, on the one hand, of a summer period and of a huge influx of emigrants, on the other hand, the year before Portugal’s entry to the EU (January 1, 1986) and with it the access to free movement.

This individuality of Crespo is equally present in the work of Paulo Canilhas “SINTO-ME… confuso / preso/ digital / mecânico / em mudança”. (I FEEL… confused / trapped/ digital / mechanic /I’m changing”. [70x46cm, Photographic composition – Digital printing glued on PVC), in which he tells a story of his personal life and which impels us, spectators, to our free interpretation. As a curator I see myself in this “invisible” story of Canilhas, where I find the representation of an individual identity, but transnational, in a troubled period as today, in which the days are filled with interrogations and the uncertainty guides the chosen paths. Paulo does not consider this work finished, just as no story of a human-being is. In Canilhas’ installations, “Organic”, the artist, once again, explores the issues of individuality in today’s world. He inspires himself in a mechanized, industrial, urban and polluted universe that destroys and suffocates the individual since the 18th century. One day, will there be room for the organic matter to regain its space? This is the issue that Paulo evidences by referring: “ORGANIC are my view of that time in which the organic matter, who knows in which way, emerges under the cold and tumular metal and will try again to win its place in the world”.

As dialoguing with these works, we observe the video “Intersecções no espelho” (Intersections in the mirror), where Isabel Lima portrays the national identity, specifying the feminine example. She uses identity elements of the women of the north of Portugal and in her words: “I explore dense and fluid ambiances, playing with an iconography associated to the identity of the women of the north – linen, headscarves, embroideries, jewelry that intersect with ethereal, dense and dramatic ambiances that at times blend into woman/girl, doll, who plunge in the dark and violent swamp of the forest of their existence, where desires, dreams and fears coexist”.

The installation “Pó de arroz” (Rice Powder) of Isabel Lima [fabrics, wire, acrylic paint, steatite and aromas, 200cm X 300cm X 250m] disturbs us deeply. A bride with no face wrapped in barbed wire and in red mantles refers to the physical and psychological violence of human relations and of so many anonymous faces where the individual as individual has no right for respect, nor for visibility (Oliveira, 2012).
In parallel with these works, the photographs of Carla Cruz’s “Maintenance Art: Homage to Mierle Laderman Ukeles” performance and the serigraphy “Conjugar no Plural” (Conjugate in Plural), intensify, once more, the feminine position. In the first work, Cruz, in tribute to Ukeles, the north American artist who brought domestic to public space, by cleaning the museum, gives visibility to the cleaning team. The performance was held in Guimarães, in the space managed by artists, the Laboratory of Arts. The space was going to close, it was thought then that it was going to be demolished. The exhibition for which the performance “27 artistas uma casa para demolir” (27 artists a house to demolish) was conceived emphasizes this situation. Cruz refers “I wanted to make a performance that would be rather absurd, clean a space that would disappear. By doing it something happened, the space that I cleaned in contrast with the rest of the floor became a kind of centre under a spot, as if it had not been cleaned, but lit.”

This exhibition was also included in Óbidos Art Challenge/Desafios Artísticos of Óbidos that, during March 18-21, developed a curators’ residence where Ana Maria Calçada, João Bernardes, Carolina Quintela, Cristina Cardoso and Leonardo Quintela participated. Filipe Curado and Thomas Schittek were also the plastic artists invited to participate in the debates.