DIVERGENT GAZES, MUTUAL APPROPRIATIONS

Encosta–Contemporary Art’s new project is a collective exhibition that gathers the works of six artists. Most of them are already known on the Portuguese artistic scene. For others however, although they have a marked presence in the artistic context of other countries such as England and Finland, it is the first time they have presented their works in Portugal. All of them bear revealing witness to the most recent directions and processes in contemporary art.

The different works presented, and the multiplicity of suggestions they convey us to, work as an attempt to reorganize the relations between space and people, between architectonic references and the technological transformation of the memory of places and landscapes and between the subject and his camouflage.

This set of works, all produced specifically for this exhibition, are thus the result of a critical choice, motivated by curiosity and allegiances and articulated by research performed in collaboration with each of the artists. At this moment all of them are to be found in prestigious collections and institutions, within and outside of Portugal. Now, they involve themselves in an accidental and ephemeral relationship, a result of divergent gazes that give place to an arrangement of reciprocal appropriations. All of them transmit signs of a symbolic means of production dominant in contemporary aesthetic communication: Appropriations, dislocations and intertextuality. The authors of these works, photographs, installations and paintings already define a poetic specificity and authorial identity in the panorama of international art. The visitor is invited to participate in a game and is also submitted to the many rules of the gaze and of desire. In short he appropriates or is appropriated.

Curator: Eduardo Paz Barroso

Artists:
António Júlio Duarte
Axel Antas
Danny Treacy
Isabel Simões
Mário Pires Cordeiro
Paulo Freire de Almeida

www.encostagaleria.com