This new exhibition at Brisa Galeria brings together the work of Daniel Mattar and Ana Durães, two artists whose approaches, different in form and language, manage to find common points within this (after all apparent) difference. It seems especially important to focus on some of these points, since both proposals play with the power of observation and lead the eye to a common pulse and heart.
Daniel Mattar has been working on the surprise and amazement that the revelation of his universes provokes in the observer. Now, with Altered Nature, Mattar uses for the first time organic supports, living but perennial organisms, through the artist's intervention.
Mattar's photographic work now stops at a more poetic plane, where nature itself lives in that infinite moment without time or space. There, and while the creative act itself has not yet occurred, emptiness and absence await the arrival of the lens gaze and the mechanical process for everything to finally make sense. It's that action that builds everything. That is the moment of the birth of water and storm, of light and heat, of spark and flame. The artist gives us the task of reading and unraveling. Slowly rivers wind their way through mountain ranges, to become arteries of blood and life just ahead. The whole complex process of Daniel Mattar's work is then rewarded with this delivery to the observer, who only has to make use of his time and look.
It was this time and this look that called the presence of Ana Durães to this moment. Ana, born in Diamantina, State of Minas Gerais, has been showing her work in several countries and continents. With a long and multifaceted curriculum, Ana Durães has here her first exhibition in Portugal and finds in Daniel Mattar the ideal partnership.
The work the artist shows us in this Altered Nature is based on the human relationship with the elements, sometimes a measurement of forces, sometimes a generous exchange of affection, sometimes greed and fear,sometimes gratitude and plenitude. In this work, everything will condense into a relationship of love and respect towards mother and protective nature.
From her studio in Petrópolis, surrounded by the most incredible landscape that nature offered her country, Ana was building these paintings in an atmosphere of peace and gratitude. On these linen canvases, Ana was capturing, in soft and tender brushstrokes, the nature that her gaze contemplated, picking her motifs from the garden or the green of the horizon.
Ana Durães' palette became different. The reality of her native country painted her gaze with melancholy, raised old concerns and doubts, but involuntarily led her to serenade her colors. These paintings overflow with clarity and clarity, flow luminously, hover and delight. Now, under the light of Lisbon, from dawn to dusk, these works take on a new tone, perhaps more optimistic than the one the artist left behind in the studio in Petrópolis
I can't resist sharing something she said to me in one of our meetings in Lisbon, in preparation for this exhibition: "My nature is soft. I am like that, I cannot create within suffering."
Rui Guerreiro, 2020
Curator and Text: Rui Guerreiro
Exhibition set-up: Pedro Canoilas
Realization: Brisa Galeria
