Atelier Primeiro de Outubro, curated by Helena Mendes Pereira, Cerveira Cultural Forum
Mafalda Santos (b.1980) recently chose Vila Nova de Cerveira as a place to live and it is on Avenida Primeiro de Outubro that she established her studio. This individual exhibition was developed in a site specific context for the open space of the Cultural Forum of Cerveira, with the artist occupying the space and expanding her work. The series of works presented here intends to be a retrospective dive into the various aspects of her artistic production, which always favors detail in compositions, given through a carefully chosen palette of a gradient of colors, which is the common denominator in her painting, drawings and constructions in which reused printed paper is combined on dynamic wooden structures. The medium of drawing, as a starting point, is the space of symbolic freedom of gesture and the discovery of forms that she methodically repeats on later.
In her two-dimensional plasticity, the artist does not favor mediums, using paper, canvas and more dynamic structures that she designs and constructs. Mafalda Santos is a maker and builder of chronologies. Her assemblages of points, lines and small color planes, seem apparently random but are guided by a superlative search for balance and harmony, reflecting her intensity and dedication and a constant search for experimentation.
On the canvas, the central element of this installation-and-expographic object, this demand becomes incessant and the pre-existence of the method and planning of what is to be painted is evident. When we expand to this more recent series of objects, drawing and painting continue to mark the form of organization of the material that is reused: there is a suggestion of order in the combination chosen for the grouped paper and there is a poetics that marks the symbology of the objects .
ATELIER PRIMEIRO DE OUTBRO is, therefore, a synthesis and an analysis of paths, with reminiscences of its various processes, although there is an evident coherence of language that tells us that it is the work of Mafalda Santos and not anything else. The open space is occupied, functioning as the shipyard dreamed by the artist, where everything transforms through Art. Open until 19 October 2019, this is an exhibition that marks a choice and an arrival, at the same time that it is the starting point for new artistic discoveries that the landscape and energy of Vila das Artes will try to impose.
Helena Mendes Pereira, 2019