Obra Gráfica
COLLECTIVE – PORTUGUESE ORIGINAL GRAPHIC
Prova de Artista ( until 15 th Setember )
The new “Obra Gráfica” is about a new way to be and of being in the world.
Engrave is digging, is marking a surface with incisions, with textures. Engrave is impose the violence of an incision or the mark of an acid.
The engraving is an alchemy of techniques and supporters – the matrix with a latent image – that lead us to another visibility, surprising, through passage/printing to another supporter. This passage can be made over and over again transforming the image we get into a multiple one, which is its origin beginning.
All this process lives in passing through out different artistic shapes: engraving, design, sculpture, painting, mechanic processes – industrial or not – and also today with computer or digital technologies.
Current art has, as one of its particularities, the constant transgression and dissolution of the boundaries that define gender and artistic characteristics. The use of computer in arts has aspects that lead to a profound renewal of way to conceive practice and the artistic object. The multiple image and its processes also attend today to significant transformations when practicing experimentation, of theoretical and practical speculation and search of new languages and solutions.
Since the last two decades of XX century many breeders transformed the new languages into an essential activity of their creative process, due to their own ability to offer innovator means and interesting options of experimentation. Consequently, we see as a result an increasing implementation of multidisciplinary activities that have conventional techniques associated to new languages, using alternative material and the new technologies. Thus, also the Obra Gráfica/Gravura, as a way of artistic expression, uses hybrid processes and products. Many of the parameters that, till the end of the XX century were used as defining elements of multiple artistic image, have no longer this rigidity.
Although these transformations in the way of doing and seeing, remains with no change its status of cultural product, but demands focus on his creative ability. It’s increasingly an issue of identity in relation with the work process and the artistic object.
Together with traditional/conventional of Engraving we are before new ways of creating these images and alternative ways of looking at them.
It’s with this open and current mind that we can look and see today different ways of feeling and creating “Gravura/Obra Gráfica”.
Lisbon, May 2, 2011
Manuela Cristóvão
Image: “Lasting dream” by Fátima Ferreira