Catalogue of the exhibition Ernesto de Sousa, Exercises of Poetic Communication with Other Aesthetic Operators, held at Galeria Quadrum & Galeria Avenida da Índia between 27 November 2021 and 27 February 2022, curated by Lilou Vidal. The publication consists of a booklet with photographs of the exhibition, and a book with texts by Hugo Canoilas, Tobi Maier, José Miranda Justo, Paula Parente Pinto, Ernesto de Sousa and Lilou Vidal, photographs of the artistic and curatorial projects developed by Ernesto de Sousa, as well as archive documentation about them.
“Above all, it was the organisation of exhibitions that was paving the way for avant-garde art to be produced and placed in a social relation with its viewers in Portugal. If we are to pay homage to Ernesto de Sousa on his centenary at the Galerias Municipais – Galeria Quadrum and Galeria Avenida da Índia, then we are should also revisit his often-collaborative work through the lens of a generation of young artists.”
– Tobi Maier
“To examine the entirety of Ernesto de Sousa’s colossal body of work is to accept a feeling of incompleteness, to drift into blurred zones of heterogeneity where ambivalence, variations, and fragmented aesthetics remind us of the productive and non-reducible forces of the multiple trajectories that emerge in the poetics of the “open work”.”
– Lilou Vidal
“The importance of Ernesto de Sousa’s legacy is defined by the way it continues to be reworked and to be open to new readings. His studies of popular art and the way he interacted with various moments in art history (from the Romanesque to the Gothic) enable a historical non-linearity, creating a simultaneity of past, present and future. The past is the liberating anachronism that is devoid of meaning. This is because we travel from the future to the past in order for the work to happen.”
– Hugo Canoilas
“But what is more important in this context, and in the aesthetic operative will of Ernesto, is the fact that before us a truly non-restrictive field becomes open for the immoderate growth of creativity and for the (let us say, potential) annihilation of death.”
– José Miranda Justo
“His work was characterized by the free association between people; he was an “aesthetic operator” did not establish any frontiers between the recording of the experiences of others and his own vision, seeking to enlarge the cultural field and to extend the artistic support to the social context, the real medium of his work.”
– Paula Parente Pinto
“Now the artwork has returned to be the original verb, or scream – as Raul Brandão would say – responsible for, and bound to, its inaugural adventure in the world. In concrete sense, the artwork will need to return to being the word that breaks the silence between myself and another. This effectively means a return to orality, which the civilization defined by libraries and the queen-image interrupted long ago.”
– Ernesto de Sousa