– 10.05.2015
Saturday and Sunday: 2pm-6pm
Lisbon City Hall promotes an annual Exchange Programme for Visual Artists between the cities of Lisbon and Budapest, under the auspices of the twinning agreement between the two cities. This programme provides a one-month residency for two Portuguese artists in Budapest. Simultaneously two Hungarian come to Lisbon, for the same duration.
Since 1992, when the twinning agreement was signed, the artistic residence programme has already allowed about 40 young Portuguese artists to develop a project in the city of Budapest and in return has welcomed the same number of Hungarian artists to Lisbon.
This exhibition at Quadrum Gallery is a result of the work developed during the residency in 2014.
The group of works now on view at the Quadrum Gallery establishes a relationship of continuity with two previous exhibitions. Flecha [Arrow] and Corda [Rope] were titles borrowed from geometry, terms that evoke the definition of the line in space. In the case of Cortina [Curtain], the artist points to the plane as the main referent, with particularities and nuances that play with perceptions of lightness, transparency and fragility.
Cidra proposes four pieces displayed throughout the gallery, hybrid elements that combine and operate in the intercession between the disciplines of drawing and sculpture. Using paper and iron as raw materials to give body to the objects, he establishes analogies between the two fields: the form and strength that iron imposes on paper when agglomerated; the capacity of paper, when dry, to freeze the sculpture in a place and moment; or like “Untitled” 2014, where the acceleration of the iron’s oxidation process is stimulated, spreading through the paper through colour and texture.
The exhibition alludes to possible structures. The works are arranged hierarchically in space by a gradation from composition to depuration, and vice versa. Sculptural planes function as devices to show other pieces. The line can assume a closed form or just insinuate limits that enable the spectator to conclude or mentally complete the drawing.
Drawing therefore reaches various levels, a fundamental part also in the reflection on the exhibition space. It is through preparatory drawings that Cidra begins the study of the relationships between fullness and emptiness, determining the perception of the gallery’s occupation, putting into dialogue binomials such as the visible and the invisible, materiality and immateriality, weight and lightness, the individual and the global.
This mapping of the site highlights and activates a notion of movement that influences the spectator. On the other hand, the inherent movement of the sculptures and their arrangement presents a link between the design of the pieces and the design of the space, conditions that provide different approaches of the spectator to the works on view, the exhibition space and the architecture.
– Flávia Violante (Municipal Galleries)
– 10.05.2015
Saturday and Sunday: 2pm-6pm
