Manicómio x CPS Partnership

Artwork featured in the exhibition "Imitation of Existence", June 22nd to July 11th, 2021

FASCINATION AND PRESENCE OF OUTSIDER ART

The "Manicómio" project, a creative space for outsider artists who have experienced or are experiencing mental illness, was born in 2018 in Beato, initiated by Sandro Resende and José Azevedo. It has already led to several exhibitions by renowned Portuguese and foreign artists, such as Emir Kusturica, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Jeff Koons, and Jorge Molder. The current editions resulting from a partnership between "Manicómio" and CPS affirm the prestige and vitality of Outsider Art within us, an emblematic trend of modernity in the visual arts, inaugurated in the 1940s by the French artist Jean Dubuffet.

The connection of Outsider Art to surrealistic inspiration, a certain naivety that the Cobra movement (1948) also highlighted, and to popular and urban narratives, is clearly evident in the four universes presented today, by Bráulio, Joana Ramalho, Cláudia Sampaio, and José dos Castelos. These intimate universes are close to the marvelous, offering a vision that is both enchanted and disenchanted with reality, between mysticism, poetry, and solitude.

Maria João Fernandes - International Association of Art Critics (AICA)