Thursday, December 09, 2010

Abstract Art Collection Millennium bcp

In 2003 she launched the Millennium bcp brand, the result of successive mergers of several financial institutions in one group, linking history and heritage in a unique collection. Became part of him that came via the Portuguese Commercial Bank, line matrix and renewed based institution, New Network, Atlantic, and through him, Bank Commercial de Macau Bank Mello and Bank Pinto & Sotto Mayor. But the unique collection of artistic goods have passed over the years, also to make part of many goods that were incorporated as a result of mortgages, donations or purchases.

It is also the perception of multidimensional long narrative that is told through works of art, embodied in the choices of the works gathered here today and not by chance, under the theme of Abstraction, released through the core issue of works by Vieira da Silva and his contemporaries but that allowed a strengthening of visibility and dialogic reading with other nuclei present in the collection copyright Millennium bcp. Although it is notoriously absent in the collection of artists such as Fernando Lanhas for a more detailed review of the concept, it can create many situations of encounter between an approach borrowing from the experience of geometry, in which the rigor of the strokes to be confused with the symbolism of the vocabulary and appearance of the most convulsive gesture. Accordingly, and based on the suggestion to build in the works of Vieira da Silva, its landscapes meticulously organized or emotionally dysfunctional in raptures trace energetic and creative, was divided into two and the choice of exhibition space. Having such a prominent figure of geometric abstraction Nadir Afonso, brought to the route experiences grounded in the use of geometric symbols, the texture of its rhythms, chromatic and formal work that organizes. These proposals will reshape years later, in works such as Fernando Aguiar, making these elements of a vocabulary building visual poetry, or of Pedro Casqueiro in structure jarring screens.

The construction of meshes compositional element as the founder of painting or drawing is a recurring element that we find a suggestion in urban TOM graphics, support unstable equilibrium in the austere Angelo de Sousa, optical generator rhythms Eduardo Nery or inquiring of building space image with Artur Rosa. Among them were two key moments in this core work. One that brings together three paintings by Fernando Lemos, an artist whose pictorial intervention and its exposure was diluted in the face of photography and applauded their approval. Works are not seen for so long and which have had an accurate restoration work by specialized techniques and students of the Faculty of Science and Technology, New University of Lisbon in a fruitful partnership between the university and the Millennium bcp. The other, also operated upon for this exhibition brings together the work of Jorge Pinheiro, an artist of uncommon erudition in the seventies that embodies screens as large, chromatically uniform across the length over which scores are suspended fragile, as if a mapping or coded language of songs and silences it were. In connection with these works, we can still find works of Antonio Palolo, Eduardo Batarda and Manuel Cargaleiro.

But if the abstraction is generated in relation to the real, the desire to rescue the action on immobility, crossing the recognizable, the mimetic, the paradigm of figuration and to the environment that operates with an engine-building image, she has the greatest expression of the idea go. That is what is on the screens of Vieira da Silva or Nadir Afonso. But also on chromatic explosions Manuel D'Assunpção, dramatized in the visions of Nikias Skapinakis. A whirlwind of intensity gesture which acknowledges the work of Arpad Szenes, the delicate constructions of Andrew Lanskoy, paintings by Paula Rego accumulation in lacerations of Mário Cesariny envisioned in asparagus Antonio Areal.

There is, in many of these works, a landscape slowly disorganized or suggestion instead, recomposed away from what is recognizable. A sort of meeting between the visible and the inward journey with maximum expression in the exploration of matter of the painting. Zao Wou-Ki when they do happen the day of registration in a pictorial diary of sorts, in compositions of major and vibrant color palette, which is observed has the ability to focus on themselves a long history (personal and political, pictorial, graphic) in brief boost. The same applies to Manessier, even with the structural character of the spot stroke made it presents a mix weight that Zao Wou don’t have. It is one of the most important works of this core, built in the image of retable panel at the height of a moment of spiritual ecstasy. Another is the composition of Serge Poliakoff, great work, as in the formal ingenuity of its composition, the way the material and color are worked. It was one of the paintings restored for this show, the pair of Augusto Barros and Luís Demée.

At the tension between figuration and abstraction, making this productive meeting ground of creation, are the paintings of Louis Dourdil. But the figures also abstracts Júlio Resende Júlio Pomar or, here put into dialogue with the dark visions of Justino Alves and landscapes of blazing Menez and Teresa Magalhães.

Rather than create watertight compartments in reading the works were concerned with making the space as organic as possible, open to the discoveries of the viewer, suggesting more than a tight timeline, and unpredictable encounters mutual meanings.
Les chemins (paths) from Vieira da Silva, entry, set the tone...