An exhibition by Manuel Batista, recently deceased farense artist, will be inaugurated this Saturday, July 1st, at 17:30 pm, at the Municipal Museum of Faro.
The exhibition, which includes works of a diverse nature, unfolds between the Municipal Museum and the Trem Gallery, which, from that moment on, will also adopt the name of this illustrious artist from Faro.
According to João Pinharanda, director of the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) and curator of the show, «without intending to be exhaustive, this exhibition covers seven decades of intense artistic creation by this artist born in Faro and recently deceased (1934-2023)».
The works on display were produced between 1962 and 2022, having been selected and their placement in the exhibition space thought out, still with the artist, before his sudden death.
«The current exhibition is thus a heartfelt tribute to a great artist and friend, an illustrious representative of a vast array of names that confirmed the national and international vocation of the Algarve in the field of arts and letters», stresses the curator of the exhibition.
In this exhibition, whose title owes itself to the poetry of Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, with whom the artist maintained a very close relationship (as well as with other poets from the Algarve), «Manuel Baptista offers us simultaneous realities in his work: the geometric vocation of shapes and the volumes, the use of color in its most open or darkest expression and also the expression of nature summoned through a free and organic line; the accumulation of matter or its rarefaction are also articulated alternately or simultaneously in successive series or periods of work by the artist», clarifies João Pinharanda.
Some of his most iconic works will be present, such as those he presented in “Fora de Scale”, an exhibition held in 2011 at the Electricity Museum | EDP Foundation. Others belong to private collectors, museological entities and family, some of them entering exhibitions for the first time.
For Pinharanda, «Baptista created works that contain, simultaneously, all the paths he wanted to explore, in a creative hybridism, but never eclectic, where lyrical expressionism and minimalism, geometry and baroqueism coincide, recovery of the decorative vocation of art, all covered by a certain nostalgic humor through which he constructed his critical view of the world».
The exhibition can be visited at the Municipal Museum and at the Trem-Manuel Baptista gallery until the 1st of October, from Tuesday to Sunday.
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