Galeria Coletivo Amarelo, Lisbon, 2024 - Project Room, curated by Cristiana Tejo
Only houses can explain the existence of a word like intimacy
Ruy Belo
The little house made of sticks, drawn in colored pencils, a half-disheveled rectangle with a half-triangular roof, lost in some landscape, with the sun and clouds in the background. Next to it, a family of stick figures, with their round heads, waving and smiling and often bigger than the house itself.
This is the description of almost every human memory of their first graphic drawings.
The house, the family, the landscape.
Three elements that surround us all our lives, and mine too. Is it possible to go through the human experience avoiding these elements? I don't think so...
It seems that this is what we've always longed for: a roof, a sloping roof, a window that might be open, and friends or family nearby.
It seems that this is what we've always longed for: a roof, a sloping roof, a window that might be open, and friends or family nearby.
These houses asked for space, got out of the notebook and began to group themselves into larger paintings, connecting or disconnecting from each other through bridges, passages, stairs, tunnels.
In the paintings, it's just them, with no mention of the human figures who certainly were or still are there. Stains in sinuous waves cover up what was, or reveal what is to come.
The houses, thus designed and confused, are a kind of tribute to our greatest quest, a safe place in this world, in this existence.
A home should be the basic precept, the starting point of our dignity, but it is increasingly becoming a luxury. For various reasons, from political and social aspects to the increasingly intense consequences of our disregard for the planet, homes are becoming a privilege. Housing is increasingly under threat, making us even more distant from that first ideal of childhood.
If it is between four walls that we make possible our most intimate connections, our deepest pains, our best-kept secrets and our most precious memories, how can we live without them?
We are not prepared for the idleness that is increasingly spreading around the world.
These imaginary houses, cities and roads that appear in these paintings can be what was, what will no longer be or what will be. This large “imaginary map” is an invitation to think together, to open the floodgates of the imagination to new ways of living that are possible in the midst of “such interesting” times.
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