Escola Utópica de Lisboa

Francisco Vidal’s exhibition Escola Utópica de Lisboa, at Pavilhão Branco, is a radical exercise that is built from past, present and future perspectives of the creator’s artistic practice.

Conceived to give visibility to the diverse facets of his production, the exhibition both revisits key works from his early career and gives visibility to vital experiences of a utopian pedagogy where art, particularly drawing, engenders a sense of community (with notes from the cities of Amares in the north of Portugal and Luanda, Angola).

In parallel, Escola Utópica de Lisboa will also become a work in progress through interaction with different groups in the region who will benefit from the formal and social dialogue the artist establishes with these micro-communities.
At the time of writing, the results of this participatory event are not yet known, nor can we reflect on the exhibition as a whole.

A shifting and viscerally idiosyncratic entity in its desire to be open to the unexpected, the exhibition will eventually be redesigned, complemented and rewritten in its questioning narrativity. This is because Francisco Vidal is a compulsive labourer, leading a life in which drawing is integrated as a vital respiratory system.

Vital Vidal. Following in the footsteps of the jazz culture of Ornette Coleman or Charlie Parker, the artist enjoys continuous improvisation sessions in a communion of form or thought with others, immersing himself in delicious solos with the black and white of the papers (so many!) whispering in the ear of artificial intelligence: all of this is human, all too human…

At a time of civilisational crisis, Francisco Vidal points to a destructuring of institutional conventionalities: his art is made from communicative, conceptual and expressive urgency, in a continuous labour of drawing as an essential tool.
The informal portability of most of what can be seen in the exhibition is a disarming commentary on the growing commodification of a well-behaved art that colludes with the mainstream of cocktails and canapés.

If you have to change studios, roll everything up. If you have to move country, roll it up. If you have to sell, sell it rolled up or folded. Like that rucksack, neither too big nor too small, that some people keep prepared for disasters. Life running away from art so that it can become more lived, to paraphrase Robert Filliou in a twisted way.

Spock colonising Mars. A retro classic. Musk colonising democracy (and its aftermath): B-series fiction, as it were. Bring your rucksacks.

While African experiences require incessant reflection on the scars that are still open in this context, we must emphasise here that Francisco Vidal never gets bogged down in simplistic pamphleteering, pointing rather to the possibility of inscribing a prospective memory from communities that have a greater critical sense of reality.
And always with a smile.

Miguel von Hafe Pérez, curator