to May 22 | PHOTOGRAPHY AND DRAWING EXHIBIT | ZOOM IN ZOOM OUT| FREE

Here’s what curator Isabel Calado says about the new, appropriately-for-the-times tiled photography exhibit ZOOM IN ZOOM OUT at MNAC:
“We already know that all images are representations, and always have been. This means that none of them is reality and, at the same time, perhaps more subtly, that all of them maintain a tension with it. Depending on how they deal with this bond, we call them copies, decals, constructions, memories, traces, projections, imagined things, or even fantasies.

In ZOOM IN ZOOM OUT, we find seven photographs by Duarte Belo and seven drawings by four artists who dialogue with them: António Faria, David Fossard, Inês Moura, and Mimi Tavares.

Regarding photography, we should emphasize its most immediate statement, which tells us: this is reality. Despite all its most recent mutations, it is a material image that remains anchored in the external world, which today we sometimes call the Other.

Drawing, on the other hand, more easily summons up the concept of mental image. It comes from a thinking eye and a sensitive self. Unlike photography, which is fundamentally descriptive, it has more ability to deal with cognitive and emotional contents of an analytical and expressive nature, to recode information, and to explain.

The truth is that both visual genres think reality, although they serve it differently: photography begins in the external world and doesn’t lose sight of it, drawing doesn’t dispense the creative head and that is what it externalizes.

The photographer’s gaze, at least in an initial phase, lets itself be contaminated by the contours of the objects themselves and by the light of the territory he/she paints, but which can only surprise us and reveal its inlays through the former’s lens.

The eye of the designer dominates the object and manifests the exploration of linguistic codes, as much as a concept, an idea, an emotion. The drawings on display proceed, on a variable scale, to a subjectivization of what has touched them in Duarte Belo’s stimulating photographs.”

HOURS:
Tuesday to Sunday, from 10h00 – 18h00.

Exhibit up until May 22.

FREE ENTRY.