This is the publication for the exhibition Eduardo Batarda: Mise en abyme, which was on view at Galeria Municipais’ Pavilhão Branco between May 27 and August 28, 2016. This volume features texts by David Barro, Pedro Faro and Julião Sarmento, as well as Sarmento’s email correspondence with the Batarda from 2014 through 2016.
“It is a body of work so closely attached to its creator that it is inseparable from him. It is a body of work about loss where one only seems to see gain. It is also an infinite puzzle, which unfolds within itself, reproducing itself like a factual system. […] Although we sometimes see his works hanging above sofas, or wedged between doors, next to vases, jugs and doilies or among other indescribable paintings to which they have no connection and which contaminate them, EB’s work is neither decorative nor accessible.”
– Julião Sarmento
“His work examines rupture and structure, substitution and difference, the negative condition of the object, and the ontology of negativity. […] Noise, shapelessness, deterioration, and chaos, as properties and possibilities, valued and undermined, are characteristics that we find in Eduardo Batarda’s work, in different forms and with varying degrees of intensity. Dizzy in the face of this abyss?”
– Pedro Faro
“Batarda’s painting is a response to a desire that is never fully revealed. Something akin to aspiring to an improbable darkness. […] Once again humour and ambiguousness soar high over his intentions. Like a school blackboard transformed into a palimpsest, he continues to simultaneously affirm and deny painting, shrouding it, concealing it, distorting it. This is painting as critique, as its own territory, as the builder of sense and nonsense, as iconoclastic strategy.”
– David Barro
