Exhibition catalogue for Encontros imediatos de segundo grau [Close Encounters of the Second Kind], showcased in Galeria Avenida da Índia from september 21 to december 10, 2023. This catalogue published in a magazine format includes essays written by Sara Antónia Matos and Pedro Faro, João Francisco Reis, Eva Mendes, João Sousa Cardoso alongside a selection of installation views from the exhibition, curated by João Francisco Reis.
“In fact, rare are the cases in which a particu¬lar work, on its own and immediately, creates mayhem — how desirable! — in the artistic and institutional system. This has led several au¬thors to consider that the new, in itself, is an institution of the art system. In other words, a normalization, and therefore, a failed expecta¬tion. In this sense, following Michel Foucault, perhaps one might say the new lies in the gaps opened by the work, in the detours it leads us to, in the unresolved spaces that each pre¬vious work did not forbid.”
— Sara Antónia Matos, Pedro Faro
“These are not political works awaiting a reaction: they result from the atro¬phy that is part of the contemporary reality. The real close encounters of the second kind are the moments in the creative process when artists find new ways of working with painting, sculpture, video or any other artistic medium. The recreation of this common imagery is a product, not a reaction. I can only try to show it in the most organic way possible. The ques¬tion that remains is whether the extraterrestrial strangeness of the works is really the driving force behind the viewer’s fascination.”
— João Francisco Reis
“For, in the same way some images seem to be built on the certainty of their formal characte¬ristics, others seem to invade us with doubts, overlaps and attempts at plastic and concep¬tual clarification — this is me and this is the way I present myself to the world, this is my private and sincere landscape.”
— Eva Mendes
“Put together by curator João Francisco Reis in the exhibition Encontros imediatos de segundo grau [Close Encounters of The Second Kind], the twelve artists born at the turn of the century share their training at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon and present a set of propo¬sals formally and thematically clearly distinct, much like the mosaic of these community flo¬ws, combining without a priori the atomism of personal narratives, the imaginaries and the subjectivities to the level of connectivity, global acceleration and the accumulation of cyberspace data.”
— João Sousa Cardoso