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Exhibition "Ephemeral Landscapes" by Engrácia Cardoso and Rui Gaio

CUTOUT LANDSCAPES IN THE MEMORY OF ENGRÁCIA CARDOSO

"The visibility of a landscape and the emotional radiation it emanates are the faces of the same sentiment, everything is connected to the whole."

Engrácia Cardoso (b. 1976), a painter, printmaker, and award-winning artist, offers us another page today from her very particular album of memories, inspired in this case by an experience of emigration in Trás-os-Montes, involving a group of two women and several children who followed a trail between stones, weeds, and wild vegetation towards what they dreamed would be a liberating reality.

Reality becomes the starting point of an imagined nature, present in her creations for screen printing in a process that the artist herself describes: "In the face of a sovereign nature, the landscape presents itself in a pictorial space (...). Creation has its expressive place, giving prominence to an inner and intimate aspect as well as an external aspect in relation to the escape (...)." From this dialogue between lived nature and a space nourished by memories and fertile silences, the exuberance of the cutout and colorful forms of this universe is born, in a play between fine, Matisse-like lines and bold color spots, in daring overlays, in a palette that harmonizes cool and warm tones enhanced by black.

Once again, the artist invites us, with her imagined flora, to revisit the lost paradise of a peace and happiness prior to our civilization, which should inspire us. The escape here is towards a celebration of the senses, appealing to the reconquest of touch, flavors, and scents, of a lost joy, the most serious thing in life according to Mestre Almada. From the real to the imaginary that nurtures it, it bursts forth in the vibrant forms of life and magical sensuality that we are privileged to appreciate today.

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