ANA VIDIGAL - Todas las pequenas perras de mi vida. 2018ANA VIDIGALPour le plaisir des yeux |
In the distance.
Do not insist. Someone in the distance is killing the dream.
Someone breaks the heart of time.
Someone there in the distance ends with himself.
Piedad Bonnet
Espacio Minimo gallery presents the second solo exhibition in its space by the
Portuguese artist ANA VIDIGAL,
entitled Pour le plaisir des yeux and in which the Time and Memory, as
in her previous project, are still the recurring themes in all the works that
compose it but in this occasion are works on paper (paintings and collages) with
different formats in their totality.
For years, ANA VIDIGAL has
collected all kinds of elements for her works’ execution, especially
two-dimensional materials founded that can be kept flat within a painted
surface, especially paper. Cutting out papers, written, painted, drawn or
printed, assembling different pieces, letters, images and photographs builds her
treasures as precious memory containers. The interests of the artist about all
this conglomeration of things, is not only the formal aspect, carefully thought
out and carefully executed, but the story that those materials contain, that
makes it more intimate. This is which ANA
VIDIGAL maximizes in her Works. In all of them, the things she wants to say
always plays a role as seductive as what is silent, in which everything she
reveals as well as she hides, is so important. But always, in all the works of this exhibition, ANA VIDIGAL is talking about time. In her own words:
It is always time.
The time that today is so
different for us from the other in which we grew up and lived.
It is the change of that
"time", of the loss of what we considered acquired and that they want
to take away from us.
It is about what we keep losing
or, keeping, we forget ("Todas las pequeñas perras de mi vida", for
example) or the atrocious resemblance of the American’s magazines images from World
War II with the images of the America of today.
The retreat of time and
the struggle to try to make it stop ("Tanto fijé mis ojos") as in
Kavafis’ verses.
It is still the political
time that we thought happy and carefree, that plagues us like a cloud of black
graphite with ghosts of the past.
It is life like it
appears, almost out of breath and transforming the word Amor (Love) into
anagram "Roma" (“Rome”), the old and decadent one.
And then "El gusto
de los otros” (“The taste of the others").
A seventies album with
images of museums’ works around the world, chosen by someone who did not know
and ended up despised on a street market.
How will end the time of
love if we are not careful.
ANA VIDIGAL (Lisbon, 1960) where she lives and works. Was graduated in painting
from the Superior School of Fine Arts of Lisbon in 1984. In 1999 she won the
Maluda Prize and in 2003 the Amadeo de Souza Cardozo Prize. In 2010, the Modern
Art Center of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, curated by Isabel Carlos, organizes
her first anthological exhibition entitled: Ana Vidigal. Clean girl, dirty
girl. She has exhibited regularly since 1981. Some of her most recent
exhibitions have been, in 2015 Guarda (me) at the Municipal Theater of Guarda,
Guarda; Amuse - Bouche, Galería Diferencia, of Lisbon; in 2014 Jugular, Camões
Luanda Institute, Angola; Oú va t'on ?, Sala del Venado, National Museum of
Natural History and Science, Lisbon; We are unbearable, so unbearable, Nogueira
da Silva Museum, Braga; First or last (strictly personal) Baginski Gallery
Projects, Lisbon; in 2013 Jua (de vivir) Fundación Júlio Resende, Oporto; in
2012 House of Secrets, Centenary of the Higher Technical Institute, Lisbon; in
2011 Queen Anne Style, Baginski Gallery / Projects, Lisbon and The brain is
deeper than the sea, Museu do Chiado, Lisbon. In October 2018, at the
invitation of the Embassy of Portugal in Colombia, she holds two Master Classes
in Bogotá (Universidad de los Andes and ars + natura flora)
Her work is represented
in important public and private collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of
Lisbon, Collection of the Secretary of State for Culture of Portugal, MUDAS
Museum of Contemporary Art of Madeira, the Bank of Portugal, Deutche Bank
Collection, Gulbenkien Museum, Contemporary Art Museum (Chiado) Camões Institute Angola, Berardo Collection, CAMB, Manuel de Brito Collection, among others.