This exhibition exists. These images have weight and “are mechanically repeated because they can never be repeated existentially” as Roland Barthes tells us in Camera Lucida. To my invitation to think about image, responded 7 emerging artists from Lisbon. This way they occupied a space, which was, between the months of March and May 2020, unoccupied without its normal function. In this occupation movement, we gave meaning and reason to useless space, a space normally inaccessible to this group of artists.
IMAGO, Latin for Image, contemplates the open interpretation of its entire semantic universe. Also called Imago is the final phase of a metamorphosis process of an insect, where it reaches maturity. Also used by Psychoanalysis, parallels were thus established with resisting to any totalitarian attempt to reduce the possible meanings of the word Image.
In this collective exhibition, everyone responded exceptionally, proving that the personal relationship of friendship and conceptual identification of these artists is real and unshakable.
Afonso Laranjeira presents an object that shows how an image is reproduced on any device, making clear reference to a well known visual work by Sol Lewitt. — Anita Marante throws into space a shape that cuts off any attempt at softness in the message, resulting in an architectural proposal of forgetting an original and unidirectional time. — Catarina Santos spreads a delicacy that disappears in white, in which text substitutes her and presents her silent absence. — gonssalo acts in the space, marking it as a stamp of his presence in a space that was inaccessible to him, revealing the artificiality of the proposed spatialization. — Guilherme Curado totalizes any representation of him, his object representing everything, revealing the structural. — Joana Pimentel connects us all, thinking about how this exhibition can exist. — Pedro Tavares with two images shows the virtual divisible and only possible in the context of this exhibition.
Like any image, this exhibition creates a universe of meanings that, potentially, results in a contemporary critique of the temporary and the reality experienced by artists in 2020.
Isabel Ouro, 2020
Press Release
Seven emerging artists - Afonso Laranjeira, Anita Marante, Catarina Santos, gonssalo, Guilherme Curado, Joana Pimentel and Pedro Tavares - responded to the invitation of curator Isabel Ouro to think about Image, to occupy a vacant space that was empty between the months of March and May 2020. In this movement of occupation, meaning and reason are attributed to useless space that is normally inaccessible to this group of artists.
In this act of resistance, the public is confronted with the truth of the image, questioning the reality of the exhibition. This ambiguous, hypothetical and imaginary period, where the exhibition took shape, proposes a credible uchronia and blur in relation to an event that could have really happened.
The illusion drags on with purely digital works, which have no materiality and which appear as a result of computational code. With a research body that comprises 10 pieces by the seven artists created solely for this specific context, this exhibition creates a universe of meanings that potentially result in a contemporary critique of the temporary and the reality experienced by the artists in 2020. The inauguration took place on the 20th March and was open until the 15th of this month.
This initiative came from the idea of gonssalo in creating an exhibition where he invites artists to exhibit with him. The curator Isabel Ouro, his pseudonym, simulates an exhibition in a gallery space in Lisbon, with the motto to think Image. This performance takes place in the interstices of interpersonal relationships that, in this pandemic context, have become almost exclusively virtual. Thus, the artists share on their personal social networks the photographs of the exhibition in which they participated, creating an alternative reality that gives users of social networks an art exhibition that reifies itself autonomously.
All graduated in Multimedia Art from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, these artists born in the second half of the 90s and living between Lisbon, Setúbal, Montijo and London started their professional artistic career in the last years.
The exhibition is curated by Isabel Ouro and will be present on the social networks of these artists until they themselves eliminate it.
Poster by Multa
Artist Works
title: A spell is only as good as its sorcerer
year: 2020
material: vinyl
dimensions: 48cm x 280cm
synopsis: Computer code corresponding to Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 365 on the gallery wall.
bio: Lisbon, 1996. Graduate in Multimedia Art from the Faculty of Fine Art from Universidade de Lisboa (2015-2018) Post-Graduate in Visual Studies: Photography and Experimental Cinema from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (2019-2020) Has participated in several group exhibitions, highlighting: Amanhã Está o Agora, Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra - 15/12/2018-2/2/2019 and Out The Window, Arte Graça - 30/1/2020-9/2/2020
title: Sinking in the middle
year: 2020
material: mixed media
dimensions: 3,64m x 4,25m x 4,75m
synopsis: Memory becomes a material form, the temporary model a perpetual form whose proportion surpasses the human scale and that of its original function. Presented in the static moment of the fall, which alludes to its photographic or digital form, this structure considers the shift of a point of perspective in navigation- the horizon as a reference is replaced by a view from up to down- produced by technology. Simultaneously, through the preservation of a model as an artefact, where multiple alterations of the same object coexist, it considers the contemporary amnesia and conserves the collective memory of a structure.
bio: Anita Marante graduated in Multimedia Art from Faculty of Fine Arts (Universidade de Lisboa). She is currently studying in the MA Contemporary Art Practice programme, at the Royal College of Art, in London. Her work has revolved around the memory of space, anamnesis and language, usually by making use of photography, moving image and text. Her recent research gathers similar concerns while focusing on the value of failure and the contradiction of normative systems.
title: este é o tempo das cadeiras, uma composição para o silêncio
year: 2020
material: chair, linen
dimensões: installation
synopsis: A proposal to vacate the space for a total immersion on white. Silence is freefall; Silence cannot hurt silence; Silence is proximity; Silence is prior to the presence: Silence knows how to penetrate itself; Movement is stillness
bio: Catarina Santos was born in Lisbon, 1996; Studies: Professional course in ceramics at Escola Artística António Arroio; Degree in Multimedia Art, specialization in photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon; Postgraduate in Discourses of contemporary photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon. Her work has developed around the relationship between her body and the chair-object, studying new concepts that she identified as chair-body and body-chair that develop themes such as absence / presence and memory.
title: a paisagem mudou-se
year: 2020
material: inkjet printing on fine art paper
dimensions: 233cm x 98,08cm
title: gonssalo
year: 2020
material: stamp and ink
dimensions: 33cm x 40cm
synopsis: Object in which the performative act of stamping is synonym of authentication and legitimation.
bio: Born in Cascais, lived in Madeira before coming to Lisbon to study at Fine Arts. He graduated in Multimedia Art in 2018 and is currently in the 2nd year of the Master in Multimedia Art at the same college. He already exhibited in Portugal, Germany, where he held Erasmus, and the Netherlands. He has been developing the project “então…gravei.” since 2016 and more recently the IMAGO exhibition. In September 2019 he participated in Doc’s Kingdom with a Gulbenkian Scholarship. As a performance artist explores the very nature of language, the artistic medium and the creative process, appropriating it in order to create.
title: Melhores cumprimentos, Gonçalo Silva /// Out The Window
year: 2019/2020 /// 2020
material: printing on glass /// Polished aluminum framing, fine artt paper print
dimensions: 89,5cm x 100cm /// 110cm x 134cm
synopsis: Print-screen of an email sent to the gallery, asking naively how to show them the portfolio, which I got no response. /// Aerial view of the represented space. Outside vision. Denouncement.
title: Frail / Fragile (let fragility not be an obstacle)
year: 2020
material: Blown glass
dimensions: 176cm x 176cm x 176cm
synopsis: In order for the individual to affect the structural. The glass sphere as the individual, the gallery space as the structural.
bio: 1996, Faro, Portugal. Graduated in Multimedia Art from the College of Fine Art from Universidade de Lisboa in 2018, having enrolled in a Postgraduate Course in Sound Art the same year. Works between art and design, exploring in both of them the relationship between the collective and the individual. Through installation, where he seeks to amass video, photography, sound and computer generated images, we are engulfed in an environment that reconciles us with our most primal sensations, those of the “internal” and “external”, the individual and the collective.
title: Intra-connective
year: 2020
material: mobile phones (Nokia 3310 version 2000), power cords
dimensions: 150cm x 175cm
synopsis: Individual approach of the slogan “connecting people”.
bio: Joana Pimentel (1996; Lisbon, Portugal) has a graduate degree in Multimedia Art and a postgraduate degree in Sound Art at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon. Her work develops from the material form, with a physical body (installation) and/or by video and sound, of her own automatic interpretations of her surroundings from an out-of-body process, seeking to maintain them as authentic as their initial form.
title: Equilibrium
year: 2020
material: Panels of cotton, Steel cable, Video projection, Serigraphy
dimensions: 3m x 1,69m
synopsis: Two halves of a Playing Cards Deck represented by two vertical 16:9 screens side by side. To the right, presence and absence of light, on our left, a chromatic circle. Respectively, a digital proto-puzzle that questions the physical mass of two theoretically equal objects, and a digital buffer from an operative system surrounded by its copy in opposite rotation. The two panels do not have the same weight.
bio: Pedro Tavares (b. 1997, Setúbal, Portugal) took up Multimedia Art in the Faculty of Fine Arts, Lisbon, and post-graduated in Sound Art by the same institution. While combining visual and sound elements through his video pieces and installations, music is also a big part of his body of work, funcionário (solo) and Império Pacífico (duo). With the expression of day-to-day life and all its ramifications in mind, while not having a continuous narrative, the focus is on the bridge between memory and the imagination that interprets it. Co-founder of Coletivo Colinas.
Exhibition Catalogue
Created by Multa
Poster and room plan
Created by Multa
Credits
Curated by — Isabel Ouro
Support Curator — João Reis
Production — Gonçalo Silva
Support Production — Ana Manana, Pedro Tavares
Image material — Multa