EXHIBITION
Edgar Massul opens #other free works and invites us to take a new look at the Ria Formosa
The exhibition #other free works by Edgar Massul opens on July 24, at 6:30 p.m., at the Trem Gallery, in Faro. Starting from the expression “T’avonde”, from the Algarve dialect, meaning “Enough!”, the artist will conceive his work from the space that currently surrounds him, the Algarve.
The exhibition includes three work nuclei, which are divided between the TREM Gallery and Faro Municipal Museum.
The first nucleus, in the gallery, is made up of the installation – teu espelho, 2013 – a tank built with sand and water from the Ria Formosa. Water and sand are elements that move, that adapt to the space, that are absorbed. The whole process will be photographed and the result will be put up on the walls of the gallery, becoming a timeline in the process.
In the Municipal Museum, which was once a cork factory, Massul will put up a piece in the centre of the cloister, – thermal body (mother), 2013. The subject here is burnt cork from São Brás de Alportel – remains that survived the fire that devastated the hills of the Algarve and that destroyed part of a secular culture, that of cork oaks. Around this piece, which functions as an ancestral totem, though formless, the artist exhibits his drawings, made of organic matter – mud, leaves and fruits crushed on paper.
To complete the series, the artist presents a book to us, – formosa, the love story book, 2014. Mixed technique on paper, hand bound. As in the piece exhibited at Sines Arts Centre, in 2010, where the artist wrote and concealed a poem by Al Berto with the earth of the region, his book also hides and reveals a story behind the many stories he decides to tell: the stories of a wetland area, of its banks that one moment imprison, and the next expand in search of the sea in the background.
The exhibition is, in the words of Mirian Tavares, an invitation to experience a work that “needs time to be made, to be appreciated, to exist” because “the artist is in no hurry to produce. He negotiates with objects that are dictating forms, ways, modes to him. It is a primarily material work: each object reveals, in its specific texture, where it comes from. It doesn’t say where it’s going, because it always points towards the infinite of the multiplicity of meanings that simple things possess. And simplicity isn’t easy. You need to be attentive for the work, in its delicacy, to reveal itself”.
We look forward to seeing you!
> Organisation: CIAC/Visual Arts (UAlg) / Faro Municipal Council
Support: PAS / The Cork Tree / Maja Construções / Collateral
+ info: https://antigo.ciac.pt/docs/edgarmassul-otherfreeworks.html
