– 25.02.2018
Ana Manso and Pedro Henriques collaborate on their second duo presentation for ARCO Madrid. This presentation follows their exhibition “Menthol” at Ar Sólido project space in Lisbon (2016). A visit to a garage featuring the sign “La Puerta De Tus Sueños” [the gate to your dreams] served as trigger for their installation. Here, the two artists developed a scenic display that includes pictoric and sculptural works in mutual contamination, framed by a wall freeze that surrounds the space.
Ana Manso’s playful brushstrokes reveal a rhythmical metric to the refreshing intricacy of her paintings. Soft pastel colours are overlapping in a bubbly web of transparent layers, inviting the viewer’s gaze to the hypnotic realism of optic phenomena. Harmoniums of light fall in parallel dimensions. Colours emerge in a mysterious tidal conflict, as the paintings’ surface tension expands and the eye escapes, in a flight across the remnants of a previous delirium.
Pedro Henriques’ sculptural images are installed on aluminium rails, as if they existed on an aerodynamic dimension and were competing with each other. These are woodcuts painted in acrylic where the artist inscribed gestural imprints with his hands by interfering in the drying process. The angular shape of their triangular contours highlights the vortices and speed of these sculptures. They become directional signs, where occasional objects are attached, such as for example in a motorcycle mirror.
– Margarida Mendes, curator
– 25.02.2018