Location
Avenida da República, 300
2750-475 Cascais
[200 meters from Cidadela]
+351 214 826 970
Opening hours
Tuesday to Sunday: 10am/6pm
General Public: 5€
Residents: 2.5€

Manuel Amado/

The summer was just like a house to live in where everything is …
From the 18th of May to the 17th of July 2016

Opening the 18th of May at 6 pm


Curatorship: Paula Rego and Catarina Alfaro

Twenty-six oils on canvas carried out between 1975 and 2008
A selection by Paula Rego

"All these paintings possess a threatening simplicity," stated Paula Rego when she was choosing the works to exhibit. There is no doubt that Manuel Amado's work is constructed starting from a mystery that, at the outset, is simple: normal things are seen from a different angle, and thus the modes of conception of subjectivity in the apprehending of the world may become the true source of the enigma. Each of these paintings is thus an exercise in perceiving the invisible in the visible aspects of the work. His painting does not restore the visible, but makes it visible. In painting, as Klee paradigmatically stated, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but is always an exercise of capturing forces. That is why no art is figurative, as the task of painting is defined as an attempt to grant visibility to the forces that are not visible: "Fighting the shadow is the only real fight. When the visual sensation faces the invisible force that conditions it, it releases a force that can overcome it, or at least make an ally of it".

manuel amadoManuel Amado, Bathroom with a yellow courtain, 1992

 

O encontro, furtivo ou explícito, com as histórias e as imagens que as contam nunca se traduz, na obra de Paula Rego, numa tentativa de ilustrar a pintura antiga, a palavra, o romance, ou a persistência das imagens cinematográficas ou teatrais que se alinharam como as suas influências marcantes.
Ao compilar fragmentos de pinturas, caçados aqui e ali, Paula Rego arranca da sua memória histórias e imagens que estão associadas às suas impressões visuais mais profundas, auxiliada por novos - mas temporalmente longínquos - estímulos visuais que actualizam essa memória. É precisamente do confronto com as imagens do passado e a sua actualização na experiência/memória visual e narrativa da artista que surge o corpo de obras concebidas durante e após esta experiência com a colecção da National Gallery.
A Caçadora Furtiva, na Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, mostra, com particular destaque, uma série de trabalhos da artista que resultam precisamente deste encontro com as colecções de museus ou os que são criados na sequência de um convite para exposição nesse contexto museológico, sem que haja necessariamente uma relação com as colecções.
É nesta condição de caçadora furtiva que persegue a sua presa e se recolhe, para depois se fundir com ela, que devemos olhar para as obras presentes nesta exposição.

The invisible forces present in Manuel Amado's painting are firstly the affective connections to the spaces in which he has lived, and which are revealed through a memory which is not photographic, but which is reconfigured and contains resonances that come from the past and from the present, from the moment in which these spaces are being recalled by the artist through the painting. But can life, time and his memories be made visible? In his work À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust alluded to involuntary memory, distinguishing it from the voluntary memory that illustrates or narrates the past. Involuntary memory, which according to Proust contains the essence of the past, functions in a completely different manner, bringing together two sensations that existed on different levels of the body and which successively apprehend the sensation of the present and that of the past, thus giving rise to something that could not be reduced to either of them. This is how these spaces created by Manuel Amado are structured, from zones of confrontation, of divided sensations, that are re-fitted to each other, just as Paula Rego noted: "It is as if he painted in order to eradicate a ghost, something he will never be able to do."