Two paintings on canvas reproducing book covers (Animal Farm by George Orwell and Discurso Sobre o Filho Da Puta, by Alberto Pimenta), a painting that expands to large dimensions of a watercolor from the XIXth century, project for a romantic garden, 3 paintings on paper depicting a crane and 2 buildings under construction, a small house where the tiles that cover the walls contradict the scale of what could be a model (a tire on its roof accentuates the confusion of scales) and also canvases depicting the face of a Neanderthal man, men wearing bird masks, Flash Gordon,...

With apparently so disparate images where can we find any sense of coherence in this exhibition? I needed to mention one more work, the one that gives the title to this exhibition. This work is not, or does not seem to be, more than a title: HÁ ÁGUA EM MARTE, a phrase in cut-out letters, painted in the color of aluminum and placed on the wall.

And it is this phrase that everything seems to contaminate. HÁ ÁGUA EM MARTE seems to be the great title of which all the other works exhibited here will be subtitled. At the same time, in the apparent dispersion of the works presented, they appear to be a sample of the possibilities of representation. Where there could be others, but there are those, making their meaning resonate, as an orchestra with all the instruments in self-management.

But in all these works there is water on Mars, as if we said that in all the art (from which these works are the embassy that Valdemar Santos has now brought to the CAPC) there is water on Mars.

There is Mars in all art because in art there is an unreachable attainable, a place of coincidence of reality and illusion. A reality that seems like an illusion and an illusion that is nothing more than reality. And we need there to be water on Mars just as much as we need there to be no water at all. Because we want Mars to continue, wonderfully, to be another world, to exclude us. At the same time that this is not enough for us. We need to almost believe in the possibility that we could live there or have lived there. And to receive, incredulously, as long as unbelievably, the news that there will be water on Mars.

Or, better yet, isn't it the art, the water that exists on Mars?

António Olaio
Coimbra, November 9th, 2013