[ARENA] “Now, let me introduce you…” de/By Paulo Reis

[jgal iol.pt]

“Now, let me introduce you…”

Curator: Paulo Reis


The project “Now, let me introduce you…” is a group show with works of  
the Portuguese artists Gonçalo Pena, João Galrão, Miguel Soares and  
Rui Horta Pereira.
The exhibition will be shown at Farmleight Gallery on September 2008,  
in a partnership between the latter and the Portuguese gallery Graça  
Brandão Porto/Lisboa.
The curator is the Brazilian art critic Paulo Reis, director and  
editor of Dardo Magazine (a publication specialized in Portuguese,  
Spanish and Brazilian contemporary art).
The artists selected by the curator represent a variety of mediums  
such as painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and video. They are  
well known in the artistic scene amongst their generation and have  
experienced an international career, either at group shows and solo  
exhibitions. For the curator, the project shows a Contemporary  
Portugal through its thematic variety, conceptual and stylistc modern  
practices.

The work of the painter Gonçalo Pena resembles an opera where painting  
has the leading role in its own story. The artist combines in his  
arena of absurd sensations the past and the present of his own story,  
composing heroic scenes, epic and almost surreal, where the  
composition borrows for itself Blake and Dante Gabrielli Rossetti’s  
symbolism, the surrealism of Salvador Dali, Otto Dix and Max Ernst,  
the neo-expressionism of Salomé and Kippenberg among other authors, in  
an overwhelming anthropophagic manifestation of the pictorial universe.

João Galrão is an artist who shapes his work by decomposing the  
original shape. From his sculptures – wood structures covered with  
canvas – erupt organic forms, like fungus that contaminate the scene  
and these eruptions deform it. His objects and reliefs conjugate the  
historic influence of Arte Povera, mainly the pieces of Giulio Paulini  
and the new British sculpture of Tony Cragg.

The Retro-Futuristic work of Miguel Soares derives from the  
manipulation of the real by the use of digital software. The  
archaeological future, the present reshaped, the manipulated reality,  
the altered perceptions of the universe of this artist is the  
reckoning of what Pierre Lévy will call memory sharing, of perception,  
of imagination, resulting in a apprenticeship and trade of knowledge  
between groups. The work of Miguel Soares is a journey through places  
in the past and in the present of the now.

Rui Horta Pereira drawings share the Liliputian fantastic universe –  
like the one present on the pages of a Lewis Carrol book – where the  
images combine the macro and the micro. In a clever game of  
perceptions and illusions the artist creates landscapes where he  
assembles the natural with the artificial, the cultural and natural of  
the artifice,    because like Goethe said that’s how it’s nature.

Although different between them – either on the mediums or in their  
practices and intentions – the works of these fours artists share,  
nevertheless, certain romantic ideals of an interpretation of the  
story of humanity, because the artist is the one who invents what  
nobody asked to invent. In the words of the Dublin writer Oscar Wilde,  
“Art is the most intense type of individualism that the world has  
known “

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