Date: 2021
Author: Martim Brion
A retrospective exhibition of drawings from various periods. I have lived with most of these works since I can remember. They are part of my visual world. They have taught me many things, how to engage with and appreciate colour and, more recently, how to use it in my own work. They have given me a strong sense of freedom, a freedom focused on knowing oneself to express oneself and resist one’s own temptation and others of control and feeling exposed just for bearing one’s opinion openly. At the same time a strong sense of responsibility, if this freedom is to be expressed, it should be expressed with consideration, with a thought for the other and its consequences once it’s released into the world at large. Another important part is the sense that one can enjoy and improve oneself by creating something, which ultimately, it’s as close as one gets to the creation of actual life. It’s the realization of an idea, a feeling, a need, a want, a gesture, all of these put together. The return once again to the self and its self-exploration, a praxis, in mother’s case an anti-pain practice.
Sofia’s works also have a precise sense of form, not in a minimalist way, but in the intuitive, physical sense, there are always underlying forms and shapes that are elemental in sustaining her practice. The circle being one of the most important ones, the renewal, the re-start, failure and the starting over, the cycle of life and death, and so on; all are essential to her work. And so, they have become for mine as well. With a different approach, off course, but from the same base, a base which will shift with time, as so is life, it is shifting, it is change, it is movement, without it there is no life. Sofia’s work is this as well, it’s a portrait of her life, a portrait of her ideas, needs and wants, the need to express one self and be free without restraints, the only restraint being her physical capabilities and the limits of her imagination. A level of restraint/freedom I aim for at all times.
Drawing as a medium is the choice for this exhibition as it’s the focus of the Carmona e Costa Foundation; it is without a doubt my preferred medium in my mother’s work, where she has been more inventive and bolder. It ranges from mixed media collages with very geometrical undertones and pools of colour, to bigger works on paper which in my view are less restrained than the works on canvas, I would argue that there is a paradoxical reason for this; the paper in being less smooth and the brush less able to glide through it without constraint it induces perhaps a stronger sense of composition, at the same time the media used are also more varied and more mixable than just acrylic. Hence the tones merge within the composition. Recently, there has been more experimentation with collage with objects of various types. An almost Schwitters approach, but less analytical.
Of influences in my mother’s work, I see many, from the day-to-day living, the colours of her surroundings and the themes that permeate her preoccupations and interests, these are the essential influences in her work. Of artists, I would argue, Schwitters in recent approaches, her father Antonio Areal in the figurative, Sérgio Pombo in the early way of painting, Patrick Heron and Ben Nicholson in the colour field, Eva Hesse in the metaphysical approach, Picasso in the attitude to life and gesture in the canvas and Edward Burne-Jones in the mystical approach to painting and life. Others come to mind, but these are the fundamental building blocks in my view.
This is a take on my subject, my mother, the drawings from my mother.
Martim Brion 