Yesterday at the Casa das Mudas Gallery – Museum of Contemporary Art of Madeira, the exhibition ‘Particle’ by Agostinho Santos, curated by Valter Hugo Mãe, opened.
The show, which represents Agostinho Santos’ first solo exhibition in Madeira, brings together 95 works, including drawings, paintings and installations, and will be on display at that cultural space until July 14th.
At the opening, the journalist, painter and independent curator, who has already held numerous individual and group exhibitions at national and international level, said he was very satisfied with the way the works were exposed, risking mentioning that, despite being “small”, it is one of the their “best exhibitions”. In this opening, he also expressed his desire to exhibit in the main area of MUDAS in the near future.
Referring to the curator, Agostinho Santos praised the fact that Valter Hugo Mãe had the gift of making “the works speak”.
Valter Hugo Mãe, in turn, explained that the exhibition is divided into two sections, one with “very recent works that are displayed in a simple way, without the exhibition mode intervening in the reading of the work”, and a second in which the specimens are as if removed “from their peace” and placed “in a much more excessive apparatus” and related to popular art, characteristics that, as he stressed, go against the very personality of Agostinho Santos. Basically, the exhibition calls for “what belongs to the people, and what is more ancestral and informal for a space that tends to be more academic”. “It is a joy to be in Madeira and in this house”, said the well-known writer.
On the occasion, the regional secretary for Tourism and Culture, Eduardo Jesus, stressed that this is an exhibition that reinforces the offer that Casa das Mudas has been promoting through its annual programme, in this case with Agostinho Santos, who “has the particularity of being an artist who invokes his past a lot”, and who is “a source of inspiration for creativity but also for the multifaceted use of the base of his work, where recycling is one of the present components”. The ruler praised the artist’s ability to transform materials that are normally not reusable, giving them a “form of communication over the hat of art”.
The curatorship of Valter Hugo Mãe was also highlighted, who lends this collection of works of art “a language that directs us towards reflection and that concerns us a lot, in this case as elements of an archipelago where each of its residents turns out to be an island that needs to communicate with the others”.