55 years of Círculo de Artes Plástica de Coimbra | The Collection in Dialogue

CASA POSSE LAR is an exhibit that combines works from the private collection of curators in their capacity as architects and housebuilders, residents of the municipality of Miranda do Corvo and, at the same time, directors of the Círculo de Artes Plástica de Coimbra, with works from the collection of the Círculo de Artes Plástica de Coimbra. It is a group of works that have in common the concern to reflect on the three words that give the title to this exhibit CASA POSSE LAR.

A house only truly becomes a home when we take possession of it, when it belongs to us physically and emotionally, when it amplifies the space of our intimacy.

In this extension of the exhibition, the Pavilhão de Jardim do Atelier do Corvo remains on display, becoming the place where the educational service is exercised, assuming its disciplinary character as an architectural work, habitable and thus transmutable.

My home is a logo, the series of drawings, a video and a transformed chair, by António Olaio, as well as the video What makes a home a house, reflects on the identity condition of the home, as a built element, appropriation of the house, or brand.

My mother is a fish, 1993, by José Maças de Carvalho, refers to the work “as I lay dying”, the William Faulkner, where little Vardaman watches the deposition of his mother's body in a coffin, ignoring the meaning of death. On the return trip to its homeland, the casket falls on the road and is filled with water, merging the image of creation (the fish was the body of Christ, for the first Christians) and the box, the last dwelling place.

Alice, Camila and Clara It is part of a series of six canvases, five made from war photographs accompanied by a caption — summary that contextualizes the events, the wars, and also the photograph. The sixth painting — perhaps you could consider it a hors-series — stands out both for its large format and for being a life-size self-portrait of an artist mother and daughters, lying on a sofa, watching the suffering of others, quiet, in shades of gold and carmine, crossed with the cruel images of war and death, not out of antagonism but because of the continuity of those images in us.

S/Título, by Valdemar Santos, is a mapping of more or less clandestine buildings that respond to an undefined spatial need, only sensed by the artist. Houses for something, was, in fact, an unrealized possibility of a title for this work.

What house (of the arts) is this?

A strong building from an architectural point of view, which reinforces its character as an exceptional equipment, which knew how to resist the easy taste of the falsely regionalist, who marks a territory, clarifying the boundary between urban and rural.

This house will be bigger and more inclusive, the more we feel like common property, as a gateway to the knowledge that only art makes possible. For this reason, there should be no illusion, access to cultural assets requires the recipient to make an effort of progressive curiosity, of willingness to learn.

Carlos Antunes and Désirée Pedro