to Dec 31 | ART EXHIBIT | Miguel Telles da Gama. Under the Skin | 5€ (FREE on Sat)

From the organizers:

“The skin is a surface equivalent to a support for drawing or painting; skin reveals just as much as it conceals, as is the case on the surface of the paintings in this survey exhibition of Miguel Telles da Gama. The exhibition does not seek to be a summary of the artist’s career but instead presents itself as a new work, built from a series of fragments of his earlier work, following and making use of what already exists, based on the principle that everything has already been invented, but at the same time fully aware that not everything has been said—that is, from among the countless images, words, and colours, there is a great deal still to say.

The exhibition is built from parts of earlier work; each piece on display randomly connects fragments of stories with no end, images from the world of graphic art, as well as photography and cinema, which are never complete, at times covered in coloured pastes and words that give or transform the meaning.

Miguel Telles da Gama has been exhibiting since his 1990 Arremessos [Throws] exhibition, in Galeria Novo Século, which was devised in partnership with Paulo Abreu, a filmmaker who also collaborated on Debaixo da Pele [Under the Skin]. The works selected for this exhibition are from the end of the last century—the oldest a painting from 1997, Reserva de Caça [Hunting Reserve], which gave rise to the image processing that emerged in 2003 in the exhibition Fragmentos, Cernes e o Meu Cão [Fragments, Cores, and My Dog].

Chronology is secondary: the exhibition route begins with Azul Profundo [Deep Blue], 2014, continuing with more recent pieces—70 ex-votos por uma vida sexualmente animada [70 ex-votos for a lively sex life], 2021—before charging into a labyrinthine space where the words of Lou Reed can be heard, in Vanishing Act, 2016, reaching a dizzying centre filled with empty pieces of armour in Lux in Tenebris, 2018, passing through the infinite permutability of the graphic images with which the artist experimented between 2003 and 2004, attempting a narrative with paintings in Emotional Rescue, 2007, and confronting Perrault’s Contes, in the red masses of Passing Through the Red, 2013, with a cast of characters in search of an author in Encenações [Stagings], made between 1999 and 2003.

Curator: José Luís Porfírio