Publication edited on the occasion of Joana Villaverde’s exhibition My Pleasure, held at the Pavilhão Branco from October 31, 2024, to January 7, 2025. Featuring an opening essay by Sara Antónia Matos and Pedro Faro, the publication follows with texts by the exhibition’s curator António Pinto Ribeiro, Vitor Cardoso, as well as conversation between Noé Sendas and the artist reflecting on her trajectory. The catalog also includes photographic documentation of the selected works and installation views.
“Joana Villaverde’s atmospheric paintings, in this historical period marked by so much war, disintegration and aggression, are perhaps a proposal to raise our eyes towards the future and imagine the meeting of bodies, not in the sense of their reciprocal annihilation, but in the sense of a creation of common horizons or landscapes.”
— Sara Antónia Matos e Pedro Faro
“Joana Villaverde’s chromatic ‘narrative’ encompasses the vast, luminous Aviz sky, the emotions of countless trips to Palestine, Gaza’s fog, the colour of the landscapes, life, the suffering or the hope of every person. Joana does not work with words; she expresses herself with colour. Body, arms, hands, eyes, movement, brushes, colour, light and shadow, are the lexicon of her painting.”
— António Pinto Ribeiro
Noé Sendas: “In previous works, it seems there was a filling gesture, but not in these works. There is something else, music, perhaps painting is like a dance. I imagine you like a maestro in the act of conducting.”
Joana Villaverde: “It wasn’t a filling gesture, if you felt that it’s because it was poorly executed. There was a sort of rage even. But there’s no rage in me now. I’m interested in creating a sort of discomfort, discomfort, strength, disequilibrium or even beauty, and all of that through my way of moving. The physical body interests me, my presence is evident. I took the brush and did that, I gradually did that and gradually became aware of it. There isn’t a prior thought telling me: I want to be there; in fact, I want nothing [else] at all, but then I look and realize how things came out and think: Ah, this has to do with me—this is how I am in relation to things.”
— Joana Villaverde in conversation with Noé Sendas
“From a certain perspective, the cloud disturbs the horizon’s homogeneity, it is a stain on the landscape, which time and light want to erase. We are also an anomaly, which annihilates itself every hundred years. It could be quicker, were it not for the clouds and our atmosphere. The anomaly protects another anomaly. All forces seem to conspire towards a final calm, an equality, a monotony, or harsher still, towards death. And yet, yet…there is upheaval, instability, profound risk, a combination of colours that does not make sense. We are alive.”
— Vítor Cardoso