ARCOlisboa 2024

23 – 26 May

Booth F01

Cordoaria Nacional

Avenida da Índia, Lisbon

 

 

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils

André Romão

Daniel Blaufuks

Gonçalo Barreiros

Ignasi Aballí

Joana Escoval

 

 

At ARCOlisboa 2024, GALERIA VERA CORTÊS is presenting a selection of works that echo new formal experiences and conceptual frameworks within the artists’ recent projects. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALEXANDRE FARTO aka VHILS

 

 

 

Portuguese visual artist Alexandre Farto aka Vhils (1987) has developed a unique visual language based on the removal of the surface layers of walls and other media with nonconventional tools and techniques, establishing symbolic reflections on identity, the relationship of interdependence between people and the surrounding environment, and life in contemporary urban societies, as well as the impact of development, the passage of time, and material transformation.

 

Having begun to interact with the urban environment through the practice of graffiti in the early 2000s, Vhils has been hailed as one of the most innovative artists of his generation. His poignant, poetic portraits chiselled into flaking walls can be seen adorning cityscapes around the world. Based on his aesthetics of vandalism, Vhils destroys as a means to create. He carves, cuts, drills, etches and blasts his way through the layers of materials. Yet, like an archaeologist, he removes in order to expose, bringing to light the beauty that lies trapped beneath the surface of things.

 

 

This new series of embossed ceramic tiles make use of the traditional Portuguese material while creating the bas-relief and colored layers to hint at the artist’s characteristic gesture of superimposing and revealing images. These new works are the result of the extensive process of research behind the long-awaited project to open at the Paris-Orly train station this summer.

 

 

ANDRÉ ROMÃO

 

 

 

 

 

 

André Romão (1984, Lisbon) explores ideas of transformation, mutation, and fluidity primarily through sculpture and poetry, shaping his work into a dynamic exploration of these concepts.

 

Romão was the recipient of the Prémio EDP Novos Artistas in 2007 and BES Revelação in 2013. He was a resident artist at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2010), MACRO, Rome (2014) and Gasworks, London (2020), among others.

 

 

Romão’s work is represented in collections such as Gulbenkian Foundation, EDP foundation, MACE – Coleção António Cachola, FRAC Franche-Comté, among others.

 

 

 

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Taking emotion and intuition as building blocks, his dream-like figures and landscapes often occupy a blurry field between the literary and the natural realms.

 

Trunk, a bronze cast, also presents itself as a hybrid object, both human and vegetable. An object where sap and blood coincide in their aliveness and decay.

 

 

 

Discover the Online Viewing Room of Calor, André Romão’s solo exhibition, curated by Inês Grosso, at Serralves Museum. On view until 2 June, 2024.

DANIEL BLAUFUKS

 

 

Daniel Blaufuks (1963, Lisbon) has been working on the relationship between public and private memory, one of the constant interrogations in his work as a visual artist. He has exhibited widely in museums, private galleries, and festivals and works mainly in photography and video, presenting his work through books, installations, and films.

 

 

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, São Tomé and Príncipe was the world’s largest cocoa exporter for merely one year.

 

This apparent success was achieved through the exploitation not only of the plantations themselves, but above all, of the workers, the so-called servants, attracted from other colonies, mainly Cape Verde and Angola, with vague promises of a return after five years, which never or very rarely materialized.

Practically all the contracts were signed with a cross, given the inability of the labourers to sign them and, of course, to read them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GONÇALO BARREIROS

 

 

 

Gonçalo Barreiros lives and works in Lisbon. Since the beginning of his career, Barreiros has committed himself to sculpture. In his pieces, the dimensions of chance, time, disappointment, imperfection and imponderability shape a conception of sculpture as an unstable, uncertain realm. Sculpture is a possibility, a pause, an accident. Each piece is the outcome of a long process of creation and research, they are about time, they define a condition.

 

 

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Using a wide variety of expedients and technical resources, the artist has produced a very diverse body of works, sometimes presenting extremely simple pieces, using a drawing, a sound, a noise, a word, a hum, or a metallic trill, but also the instability of a balance, a difference in scale or proportion, the absence of colour.

Much of the singularity of Gonçalo Barreiros’ work seems to lie in the way in which he prepares the double movement that his works set in motion. Revealing a sophisticated domain of the mechanics of subversion, irony and incongruity, his works confront the spectator with his most intimate and inescapable reactions, and at the same time with the prejudices, censures and violence that govern many of our common values.

 

IGNASI ABALLÍ

 

Ignasi Aballí (1958, Barcelona) completed his undergraduate studies in Fine Art at the University of Barcelona, where he is currently based for both residence and creative endeavours.

 

Central to Aballí’s artistic practice is the deliberate challenge he presents to viewers’ perceptions. His work fundamentally aims to elucidate the existence of numerous phenomena imperceptible to the naked eye, yet profoundly impactful on our experiences. He underscores the notion that just because certain elements evade our visual grasp does not render them nonexistent; rather, they contribute to a semantic interplay between the seen and the unseen: evasive images, transparent yet concealing, and texts offering only fragments, incomplete elucidations, and abstracted insights.

 

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The series generically titled CMYK Seas is part of the works Aballí made using newspapers as source material, such as Lists, Inventories and many others.

 

These are fragments of photographs that appeared in the newspaper in which the sea could be seen as part of the image. But by showing only this fragment, we no longer know in what context it appeared. These are fragments that lack information, but for some reason they were part of a news story that we no longer know. We do not know if there was a war or a conflict taking place in this sea, a natural disaster, if there were immigrants fleeing their country or simply people on vacation.

The fact of greatly enlarging a small fragment of the image makes the plot of the newspaper’s ink printing visible, from the small color dots of the CMYK system (cyan, magenta, yellow, black), the four colors of ink that are used in printing.

 

Below the image you can read text, such as a caption written in four languages, which places the image in the time, place and newspaper in which it was found. From this information, the viewer can imagine what was possibly happening in the location of the image.

In “Sin Pintar” (2024), eight paintings made with eight different types of canvas are prepared to be painted on. Eight tones, textures and materials that are shown without intervening on them, the step prior to being painted. This work is related to an earlier one by the artist, titled Waste (2000), in which the paint was left to dry inside the pots without producing anything with it

The work proposes reflection on action: what can be painted on these canvases that are waiting to be activated? The supports themselves here become the finished work and are displayed as a sample book open to all possibilities. Eight monochrome “paintings” that, in fact, contain no paint at all.

 

 

 

 

JOANA ESCOVAL

 

 

 

Joana Escoval (1982) lives and works in Lisbon. Her practice circumscribes both visual and aural in the form of sculpture, collective walks, video installations, and printed matter.

 

The rhythm and fluidity of the elements she uses in her work are temporarily suspended in time, and will eventually follow their natural transition and transmission into other states of matter, keeping their new-found charges and vibrations from when they were sculptures.

 

Escoval blurs the borders between what we are so used to calling “nature” and “culture,” and emphasises instead how everything is entangled and connected, seeing “nature” and its cycles beyond a western point-of-view—and most of all seeing it as something that is not separate from us.

 

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Sound is created by a pulse, a force or a burst of enery. What we hear and feel as vibrations are these waves traveling away from the energy pulse or its source.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our bodies are bathed in and surrounded by vibrations. The vibrations that we can see are called light.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harmony resounding in our bones, and our bones propagating harmony to our nervous system.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CURRENT EXHIBITION AT THE GALLERY

 

Céline Condorelli

Museum Hours

On view until 8 June

 

Visit the Online Viewing Room