A Natureza Como Eu A Vejo

URBANO | VASCO BARATA | MARGARIDA ANDRADE

In art, the true possible reality is the one we create.

Ana Hatherly

The power of imagination is, perhaps, the driving force behind celebrating 25 years of resilience of a gallery in the middle of the Atlantic. The history of contemporary art will surely register what has been done here and what is yet to be done. We have become accustomed to Galeria Fonseca Macedo being the place where another concept of the Azores is possible. An Azores where local, national, and international artists find a home and share dialogues. An Azores where the local public has access to contemporary artistic practices of indisputable relevance. An Azores that goes beyond the geography of the islands and takes the works of its artists to other territories. We should, therefore, celebrate and cherish this project, because all of this is tremendously beautiful, but also tremendously fragile.

What Galeria Fonseca Macedo has done, continues to do and will surely do for this region is, undoubtedly, the most structured cultural politics in the field of contemporary arts when it comes to establishing a continuous symbolic imaginary of this territory and its artistic production, integrating it, whenever possible and despite all the adversities, into a comprehensive discourse in permanent dialogue with the world.

The exhibition A Natureza Como Eu A Vejo marks the beginning of the project’s 25th anniversary programme and brings together works by three artists— Urbano, Vasco Barata, and Margarida Andrade—who represent very different generations, which is in itself indicative of the continuous work of renewal and guidance that the gallery has been doing for more than two decades.

We begin our tour of this celebratory exhibition with A Montanha do Fogo (2024), a series of works by Urbano (São Miguel, 1959), which seems to extend the artist’s restlessness in the face of mysteries and theories about the origin of the world and species. In his paintings, Urbano has long shared a set of personal experiences, the things that surround him, what he has lived through. His pieces are tangles of stories that, touched by natural elements, reveal fragments of landscape, creation and life. Urbano always seems to remind us that simplicity is complex, that his paintings are fire, that his paintings are water.

Vasco Barata (Lisbon, 1974) presents BEGET II (2024), a body of work in which drawing aims to expand ideas of landscape. In these works, the influences of science fiction literary imagery are evident, but above all they show a very personal and idiosyncratic understanding of what these landscapes might become in the not-so-distant future, where humans seem to absent and where the natural world seems to have taken over the space of the man-made world. More than possible scenarios of a dystopian future, they are images built up by cumulative exercises in spray paint and India ink, in which the hand draws imagined futures. Barata seems to remind us how beautiful it can be to love death’s darkness.

Margarida Andrade (Ponta Delgada, 1996) continues her wanderings through natural spaces, questioning the generalised understanding of what is, or isn’t, natural; or whether everything is natural, and the nature-human dialectic only seeks to realise our need to separate these two categories. In Andrade’s artistic subjectivity, fictional beings belonging to a distant past, which is also fictional, are looked at from an even more distant future. This expansive temporality, where the imaginary past and future are related in a speculative way, gives us the possibility of a richer understanding of the present we inhabit. The series of paintings (Untitled, 2024) she developed for this exhibition presents the nature that surrounds her, from the plants she has around her house to the mountains of the island where she lives, but it is above all through a self-portrait, in which she hides in the leaves of a white willow, that she seems to tell us that there is no ‘outside’ of nature and that we humans are also nature, even if we reject it as an ontological point of view. Andrade seems to remind us that our body is also earth and wind.

A Natureza Como Eu A Vejo is built between Urbano’s observation, Andrade’s communion and Barata’s prospection. Although it is the works of these three artists that shape the understanding of this theme, as well as the centrality it occupies both in the history of art and in a set of broader concerns that cut across contemporary thinking, it is also clear from the title that it is up to each one of us to see and be nature.

João Mourão

Julho de 2024