"A COR DAS NUVENS"

“The color of the clouds”

MANUEL BAPTISTA E RODRIGO ROSA

First, one must understand the insularity of this place. The liquid border. Only later will you realize everything else. To the west, the Atlantic. To the south, the same ocean, but with reminiscences of the Mediterranean. To the north, it is necessary to imagine the sea that is there, even if it is not obvious. A sea of ​​hills and the green swell that will touch, to the east, the Guadiana: the waters that separate us from the lands of Spain.

Here is the island.

In one of the lectures he gave at Harvard University, gathered under the title Six Proposals for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino included among the values ​​to be saved that of Visibility. The writer reacted against the danger we run of losing “the power to evoke visions with closed eyes, to make colors and shapes sprout from an alignment of black alphabetic characters on a white page, to think in images”. If I recover this idea from Calvino, that of thinking in images, it is to associate it with the idea of ​​a bridge.

The island is also the possibility of a bridge. In a geographically and culturally peripheral space such as the Algarve, all channels that allow circulation between the banks and the center are of vital importance. Art fulfills this role of communicating vessel in a paradigmatic way and feeds itself from this circulation. It is essential that the visual thinking that is produced here be able to oxygenate and exist in spaces where contemporary creation assumes vanguard positions.

The paths of Manuel Baptista and Rodrigo Rosa, who managed to break the region's borders and assert their work in the main centers of artistic creation, show us this. comes from what exactly is. In other words, perhaps it is more in the interest of those who promote it to explain the program that determines it than to expose critical considerations about the works they propose. There is an obvious excess in these words and this circumstance is only intended to emphasize a reason of prime importance in the cultural universe of the region. The color of the clouds is the first official act of the Alfaia Association and inaugurates a time that one wants another in the relationship between the artists, the community and the territory.

In A color of the clouds, attending to the novelty has a reduced degree of relevance. In the set of works gathered, only two works by Rodrigo Rosa are unpublished. It is in the arrangement that is made of them and in the refinement of the relationships that are established in the confrontation between the two artistic identities that the exhibition is fulfilled. And above all, as already mentioned, in the program of intentions that the exhibition itself becomes herald. Pay attention to the representative or symbolic character of the proposals. Manuel Baptista, with an extensive career (the first individual exhibition is in 1956), passing through Paris and Berlin, exhibitions in the main Portuguese museums and galleries, works in the most important collections; Rodrigo Rosa, graduated in Visual Arts at the University of Algarve, one of the revelations of our artistic panorama, working between Lisbon and Berlin. Both are from the Algarve by birth and return. Between the first individual exhibitions of each one there are 61 years. In the light of these two realities, the exhibition will also be understood in what it entails as a manifesto. In this sense, the curatorial options respond to a thought about the arts in the Algarve, in particular, and about their condition in contemporary society. It would be admitted that the confrontation of works by two authors with such out of synchrony times would create well-defined chronological drawers. However, the works presented seem to have been created in the same time frame. “The deepest part of man is his skin” said Paul Valéry. In Manuel Baptista, the statement seems to make perfect sense. It is on the surface that everything exists. The outside and the reverse. The internal process of drawing and its own invention.

About the works chosen to dialogue with Rodrigo Rosa's painting, Bernardo Pinto de Almeida wrote: “Round, triangular, rectangular, hexagonal or with mixed shapes, and even squares, covered in uniform colors or with gradations of minimal differences in brightness, duller, brighter, Manuel Baptista's paintings offer a catalog of forms that seems inexhaustible and whose origin dates back to his work in the sixties”. if the attentive look at the urban landscape, the sensitivity to the ephemerality of things translated into ruin and decay: cement as a reflection of the flesh under the action of time. His canvases are the walls of a city in tension between permanence and mutation. A skin that receives off-whites, cracked cement, sprays. Debris or debris from a space where harmony has broken.
When, in 2011, the EDP Foundation presented “Fora de Scale”, an exhibition in which Manuel Baptista's drawings and sculptures conceived in the 60s and 70s were realized, João Pinharanda raised the question of the conditioning of the public evolution of the artist's work. I remember the detail throwing it like a stone at the conscience of those who govern and decide so that in the future Algarve no one can ask what would become of this work or that artist if their project had come to fruition in due time.

May the island not forbid the feet.

Salvador, Loulé, 13.10.2022