Coastal, Literal, Lutheran

Yellow Collective Gallery - Lisbon, 2024

Curated by Cristiana Tejo

More than 30 years ago, the coast, this idyllic place, was the scene of her father's sudden and dramatic death. Gabriela had to walk through the landscape of Guincho beach countless times to return to the beach of her childhood, where she experienced her greatest misfortune. She had to tirelessly paint the coastline she now frequents in order to cross the ocean and return to the coast of São Paulo. One wonders why the artist calls these landscapes useless.

Is landscape useful? For philosopher Anne Cauquelin, landscape is learning the reality of the world, the constitution of norms to frame nature in an attempt to control reality within four borders. Therefore, the usefulness of landscape painting in the West was from the outset a project of domination. For Gabriela Albuquerque, landscapes are the lutoral, the place of mourning. In Angola, the calunga means both the sea and the afterlife.

As if in a dream, a red house emerges and performs a narrative that seems to have no beginning or end. It is the main character in the story told in the Beach House series. In a filmic rhythm and cut, we see it in the distance, we can see it from the inside, but we can't tell for sure if it is being swallowed up by the sea or is emerging from the sea. This is the house where Gabriela and her family used to spend their summer vacations, until an argument led them to another beach, where tragedy struck. After her death, another break occurs, preventing her from returning to this villa. In the painting, it is haunting because of its liveliness and autonomy. It is the opposite of literalness. The poet Wally Salomão once said that memory is an island of editing and this condition appears in practically all the works in this first solo exhibition by Gabriela Albuquerque.