The CAPC offers us an intertextual dialogue surrounding black and passion through a group of works by contemporary Portuguese artists: Albuquerque Mendes, Alice Geirinhas, Helena Almeida, Rui Chafes, Sofia Leitão and Vasco Araújo. As a kind of redundancy, the protective mantle of material opacity (“Negras”) and the torment (“paixões”) speak of the need with which one cannot live, of the smile that suffocates, of the jealousy that hangs alive. (...)
Pedro Pousada
The tradition of portraiture, and more specifically of self-portraiture, dates back to Dutch Renaissance painters. Before Michelangelo portrayed himself in his Sistine Chapel fresco, or even before Velásquez released the author's face (Las Meninas), Van Eyck portrayed himself — “the Dutch way”, that is, through reflection and miniature — in the Arnolfini wedding scene (Arnolfini Portrait, 1434). With this masterful scene, Van Eyck went from being a witness to a writer of stories — both social and religious, because for the first time in history, the artist became the perfect eyewitness, in the truest sense of the word. What is known about Humanity, to a large extent, is due to portraits, as well as religious paintings and worldly scenes.
I can understand the reasons that led the artist Albuquerque Mendes, one of the Portuguese names to emerge in the seventies, to merge the entire tradition of painting, self-portrait, religious rites with the action of performance. O Insight of the artist is to have transformed the moment into the perfect eyewitness of his time — where the aura of both the object and the artist flowed down the drain of history thin. This time, the artist bounces the merciless whip of history onto the body of the artist himself who, apparently, has forgotten his role as a shaman. Art, like the religion where sacred rites are performed by those who hold magical powers, must be exercised as a transformative performance. (...)
Paulo Reis
Rio de Janeiro, May 2002
Two years before Baudelaire's death, to be more precise in 1865, also the year in which the American Civil War ended and in which the impatient Alice digs herself in a hole behind a rabbit, in that year of the triple alliance that will disgrace Paraguay forever, the literary creature Calisto Elói de Barbuda, Morgado da Agra de Freimas, was born an adult and completely unaware of these facts that circumvented the impalpable roundness of the world. Calisto, an obscure but venerable landowner from Transmontano, a Latinist province, extrapolates to Lisbon as a congressman, and becomes the parliamentarian Calisto, the unnerving of the sycophants of constitutionalism such as Cícero the one from Caesar's despotic kisses. (...)
“A Queda d'um Anjo” is one of the news of the Camilian romantic triangulation (in the unmissable combination of two men and a woman or two women and a man) that Alice Geirinhas rediscovers in a graphic style that is almost haunted and strangely close to the woodcuts that adorned the cangaço literature; and it is these folios in which the white graph, rough almost a lithic trace, dispels the blackness of the irredent and unselected life of misunderstood loves, which we must report.
Observe how the venereal astonishment of Henrique Pestana, after all, a mere bourgeois fostered by an easily wasting fortune, how this amazement detracts from the self-confidence of the conqueror Nicolás de Mesquita, a gentle man surrounded by a land genealogy that will never force him to go Brazilian or allow him to blur his days in a miserable place. (...)
Pedro Pousada
Over the past 40 years, Helena Almeida has developed a body of work that began by exploring the limits of painting (of which the series is an example) Pintura Habitada, 1974–77), transforming ideas and experiences into images. Almeida combines the photographic image with the drawn line and the painted stain, in compositions that investigate space and that draw the viewer's attention to the surface of the work.
The artist is always in front of the camera, although she never considers her works to be self-portraits. Assuming carefully choreographed and staged positions and expressions, Almeida describes her work as performances intimate ones presented in an empty room for which the only spectators are the camera and her husband. Since the first photograph, Artur Rosa has assumed the role of the one who presses the button to capture the image. A collaboration that has always been considered not as a creative intervention, but as a follow in specific directions. (...)
In his most recent work, presented in this exhibition, the two bodies rediscover each other in the image. Once again they are attached to each other, but not through paper or a hug, but through a wire that ties them around their legs. In the video from the same series, the artist herself can be seen tying her leg to that of her husband. In the photographs, you can only see the legs already attached walking back and forth in an apparently neutral space.
The performance suggested by these photographs by Helena Almeida, it represents a kind of dance of love and tension between a couple. A journey of companionship but also of hostility, of courage and pain, of life and death. Although, as mentioned before, Helena Almeida's works never carry a biographical burden, it's hard not to speculate about the relationship between the artist's life and work. (...)
Filipa Oliveira
Is “unsaid” one of the formulations of “interior”? This will perhaps be the way to question the work of Barry and Chafes. A sculpture mobilizes the voice and the spells of the voice. This seems to mean the impossibility of saying that it is also the impossibility of accessing the interior.
We inhabit another, or so we think of this machine that links us and leads us to the unavoidability of the interior. The voice here is a stream of consciousness. And nothing can presume the presence of that voice other than the exercise of immersion in deep psychology that the work of Barry and Chafes requires. (...)
A work of art — another — is inside us, and each one of us surrounds it, around it, serves as a limit. A skin sewn to the “soul” that, enigmatically, becomes the outside of that body, of that anthropomorphic machine that holds a voice.
In fact, it can be said that all of Rui Chafes' work is a representation of this process. It's an object that is distributed, dispersed, multiplied, and that simultaneously ensures, through this dispersion, it's material and formal coherence.
Luís Quintais
Even today, I remember a teacher who strongly stated that there were five colors of passion, all of them containing properties intrinsic to fire, and then enumerated them: indigo; violet; cinnabar; Sienna and almost black, and emphasized that it was almost black and not black. (...)
The Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra (CAPC) in a proposal called Negras Paixões recognizes in a text, which traces the background of the exhibition, the possibility of a repetition of words and ideas — “a kind of redundancy”; between Negro (restricted to the property that veils, that covers, that conceals) and the paixão (understood as something that torments and suffocates). The CAPC, considering these two terms in this way, proposes the possibility of having the same frequency, a harmony, and this because it seems to find common symptoms. This form of questioning is already a very contemporary way of securing and obtaining a wide range of questioning material.
In this way, the CAPC proposal easily becomes an appeal to the contemporary. By proposing resonances, which obviously also incorporate dissonances, that may exist between “black” and “passion” he creates a “no longer” and a “not yet” capable enough to create a list of “quotes” and “updates” that create this way of understanding the contemporary as belonging to a place, to a “here”, which is both past and future.
Sofia Leitão responds to this CAPC proposal with a work that represents a huge cluster of quartz crystals about one and a half meters high and almost the same in width. This piece, made with the use of mirrors and sequins, recreates a type of disease that is very common in this type of crystal. It is a deposit that forms, a kind of black-colored calcination that surrounds and covers the crystal from its axis and that spreads to all the prisms of the crystal and ultimately removes all it's shine. In this sense Sofia Leitão found a way to represent the idea of the black and the asphyxiation of the glow. (...)
Rui Leitão
In Vasco Araújo's work, there is an incessant need to recover identity as an essential category and condition of freedom. This search leads us to a drift traced by the constant use and appropriation of seminal texts by reference authors, but also of fictional texts — which the artist commissions to writers — that constitute the background and conceptual structure of his works, regardless of the media he uses, be they video, installation or objectualized drawings. As an example, we can mention some literary and philosophical works: Hipólito by Eurípedes, for the work Hipólito, 2003; excerpts from Homer's “Iliad” and “Odyssey”, for the work Jardim, 2005; “Diálogos com Luecó” by Cesare Pavese, for the work Eco, 2008; and more recently “Devaneios de um Caminhante Solitário” by Jean Jaques Rosseau, for the work Telos, 2011. These texts are part of the subject matter that is worked with the moving image and the voice, transforming the various houses of knowledge into one semantic polis that are the seat of the author's thought.
The works chosen for this exhibition, “O Percurso”, 2009; “Álbum” and “Black Family”, 2008 — video, sculpture and drawing — have in common the word as an aggregating element of the imaginary representation and, thus, of our imaginary. In the work “O Percurso” (with original text by José Maria Vieira Mendes) we witness a fictional dialogue — constructed from a monologue — between two Roma men, a young man and an old man, who are looking for a land of welcome. (...) In the same line of thought, the sculpture “Álbum”, a large dining table containing thirteen embedded photo albums, evokes a close and familiar connection, the place of family dining, but in which each one is represented by a kind of parable stripped of Images that ultimately lie in the meaning and function that we attribute to objects (the table as a meeting place and the album as the residence of memory). (...) But it is still the absence that remains in the drawings executed on cut and torn black cardboard, from the “Black Family” series, which find a correspondence with other series of drawings executed by the artist using the same technique, but denoting different colors and meanings, such as, for example, White and Blue, Golden or Pink. (...)
Absence is here synonymous with path, desire, and finitude. An immense interrupted map that only the semantic geography of the word can recover.
João Silvério
Organization
Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra
II Festival das Artes
Assembly
Construções Neto
Photography
Valdemar Santos
Text
Pedro Pousada
Paulo Reis
Filipa Oliveira
Rui Ribeiro
Luís Quintais
João Silvério
Graphic Design
José Maria Cunha