VÊS.TRÊS :: WALLPAPER
02. — 21.06.2021 (except holidays, weekends and 18 June)
Mercês Cultural Space, Lisbon
‘Three bodies are sitting, crouching, kneeling, close together, far apart, but never too far apart, because they all need each other to become one, in this game-ish in which they are unique in intention and stripped of individual ego.
It's a collective catharsis that is created between intention and experimentation. A game in which the rules are written individually and as each one paints, always at the same time as the others. It is born, dies and is reborn. What is it? A collective painting that is born in spray, acrylic, dry pastel, oil pastel and enamel and that says separate and mixed things where some annul others as in a cosmic clash of boiling pictorial matter and collision that both kills and creates. There, in that long roll lying on the floor, ‘nothing is lost, everything is transformed’. It transforms into direct or subliminal messages, which will be separated again when they are available by the metre as if they were simple wallpaper, fabric, another material, or even the value of a house broken down and valued in square metres. This is the art they want to make from that roll, art by the square metre, pieces of ideas from the three of them in colourful abstract or figurative paintings, or both, but taken as if it were a cheap material bought in a retail store.
Can painting be like this? Yes, anything is possible in artistic practice, even its false devaluation. Dadá showed this, Arte Povera, Pop Art's methods of repetition, copying and vulgarity. In this reel we have a bit of all that, Pop, Neo Dadá (for the provocation and as if it were a fake ‘cadravre exquis’), Abstract Expressionism reminiscent of one of those huge New York lofts, and a mural, yes, a mural that will be dismantled like the Berlin Wall and sold in pieces.
The value of art, the value of things in life, of houses, of everything. The value of the art made by the three artists, who are questioning themselves and confronting audiences who are not used to this false devaluation. In this intangible experimental world, the focus is really on appealing to what is fair - what is accessible - both in the artistic-cultural milieu and in the lifestyle that each of us lives.’
Leonel Ventorim
May, 2021