21st Century Portuguese Surrealism

21st Century Portuguese Surrealism

Oct 10, 2013

21st Century Portuguese Surrealism

FELLINI Gallery is pleased to present, 21st Portuguese artists. Each artist approaches through their own process examples of surrealism that reflect on subconscious undercurrents of daily life. 

Joao Cavalho's rich oil paintings bring to fore a sense of frozen time, instances often of silent memory, mysterious objects and deserted subjectivity. The detailed paintings by Helio Cunha gleam in a mysterious and magnetic way, attracting through the power of their object-ness a protrusion, as if wanting to be uncovered. Victor Lage's realistic graphite drawings of natural dream-like scenes seem both spiritual/otherworldly while at the same time holding to a documentary precision. In his intricate paintings, Santiago Ribeiro meticulously portrays the collective unconscious of crowds, where individuals remain small elements of shifting universes, and cities are subjected to swayed perspectives. Isabel Meyrelles intimate sculptures inject a malleable playfulness into the impossible and allow simple disjunctures of objective meaning to indulge unlimited fantasy. The black and white digital manipulations by Paula Rosa centralize on the deconstructed human body, uniting it as housing for industrial structures that are embedded before skies of infinitely pluming smoke.

“21st Century Portuguese Surrealism” is a group exhibition, initiated by the participating artists Santiago Ribeiro and Victor Lages and follows from the initial show “International Surrealism Now”, which took place in Coimbra, Portugal in 2010. Thereafter it has been presented in Conímbriga, Setúbal and Lisbon, as well as in Madrid and in Paris.