Vasto Universo
Isabel Madureira Andrade
Isabel Madureira Andrade
Inauguração26 out. 2024
VASTO UNIVERSO
[VAST UNIVERSE]
26 out. 2024 – 02 mar. 2025
I’d like to start by dedicating this exhibition to my father, who often spoke to me about the stars, galaxies and constellations with the fascination of a child. He firmly believed that it was impossible that we inhabited the only planet with life in the midst of the immensity of the Universe. He was fascinated by this and other mysteries, from spirituality to the history of Ancient Egypt.
One day he jokingly asked me if I wanted a little star. ‘I have several,’ I replied, also jokingly, and he smiled. But in truth, I’m not sure what those little stars that I claimed to have in my possession were. Perhaps they’re the ones that guide me, without my knowing it, when I’m painting and drawing. Or perhaps it is the works themselves that, in the space-time dimension, keep on being born, growing and multiplying, giving rise to the body of work presented in this exhibition.
This exhibition brings together a set of drawings on paper and paintings on canvas, works that call for a dialogue between different periods of my career. They were produced between 2015 and 2023, and thus reveal a chronological distance that runs through them. However, these are not light years and, for this reason, it is possible to find certain elements that have persisted in their creation over time, revealing a meaning for them to coexist on the walls of this room.
Of these elements, patches of colour occupy the primordial place, insofar as everything stems from them. Initially, starting with these patches of colour, I freely experimented with a play of luminous intensities on the paper, composing images that could resemble smoke or clouds in the sky.
Gradually, these took on different configurations, with the creation of geometric shapes often becoming organised in repeating patterns. With these structures, I look for some order and rigour, and I’m certainly influenced by nature’s systems of self-organisation, such as the spots of a leopard or the magical symmetries hidden in a snowflake.
Yet in seeking this rigour, the acts of drawing and painting ask me to relinquish control (or at least part of it) so they can emerge spontaneously, without imposing my will on them. The creative act itself is unpredictable and indeterminate, something that makes itself felt through a gesture or movement of the body, or through the way the paint behaves and its deviations.
By thus creating this space, the works offer countless possibilities for variation within a given structure. These variations occur not only at the level of form, but also at the level of colour – which was black matter on paper in the first drawings, and paved the way for the shades of dawn in the most recent paintings.
ISABEL MADUREIRA ANDRADE
PONTA DELGADA, AZORES. 1991
Isabel Madureira Andrade lives and works in Lisbon.
She has a degree in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (2015), and a Masters in Painting from the same institution (2018). Between 2014 and 2016 she attended the Mart Artist Residency Programme in Lisbon.
In 2019, she received an Honourable Mention in the 13th edition of the EDP Foundation New Artists Award. In 2021, she was awarded the III Millenium BCP Foundation Acquisition Prize for Emerging Talent.
She has shown her work regularly since 2014, with exhibitions in various galleries and institutions, including: CAPC – Centro de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra; MAAT – Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia; Museu Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva; Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporâneas; VAGA – Espaço de Arte e Conhecimento; Galeria Fonseca Macedo – Arte Contemporânea; Galeria Cristina Guerra – Arte Contemporânea; Galeria Bessa Pereira – Arte e Design; and Atelier – Museu Júlio Pomar.
After Esperlho [‘Mirror’] (Fonseca Macedo Gallery, 2021), this is the second solo exhibition she has presented on the island of São Miguel.