Framed within the celebrations of the centenary of Júlio Pomar, Tragédia e Farsa. Júlio Pomar e Gabriel Abrantes (Tragedy and Farce. Júlio Pomar and Gabriel Abrantes), curated by Sara Antónia Matos, continues a programme of exhibitions at the Atelier-Museum which, every year, crosses the work of Júlio Pomar with that of other artists. This crossing aims to establish new relations between the painter's work and contemporaneity, enquiring whether the concepts and questions raised by the author remain operative in the present. Some of these questions (the relevance of pictorial practice today, its critical and political potential, and the very devices of exhibition) are what Gabriel Abrantes seeks to problematise. Thus, this exhibition is conceived, from its genesis, as a specific intervention in the space of the Atelier-Museum, also evoking a museography of the 1940s, alluding to the General Exhibitions of Plastic Arts (in particular that of 1947) at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes (National Society of Fine Arts). After challenging Gabriel Abrantes (b. 1984) to carry out an exhibition focused on the specific domain of painting, highlighting its most pressing issues — “painting, painting”, as he was asked in one of the first meetings — and after several conversations with the museum team, consultation of images of works, documentary photographs, among other elements, Abrantes put forward the idea of an exhibition with the title Tragédia e Farsa (Tragedy and Farce). It is, therefore, an allusion to Marx's phrase, which in the book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) states that history occurs twice: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The works that Gabriel Abrantes produced to be part of the exhibition at the Atelier-Museum are of a different tonality, generated by other tools and inhabited by another type of figuration. The palette came to be or to have the luminosity of the screen, hyper-coloured, the texture is flat and the thickness proper to real bodies was lost in the manner of the digital. However, the digital work on the images does not annul the need for painting as a manual, more traditional, or analogue practice. Gabriel Abrantes draws, digitises, makes three-dimensional, spatialises, manipulates, projects and finally paints in oil on canvas and even, like Júlio Pomar, scrapes the paint on the pictorial surface.
On the ground floor, the installation conceived by Gabriel Abrantes evokes and updates the 1947 room of the SNBA, Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (National Society of Fine Arts), based on Mário Novais's photographs of the 2nd General Exhibition of Plastic Arts, which constitute reference sources for understanding the exhibition and which are also reproduced here. The photographic records by Mário Novais, made available by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, attest to the museographic qualities underlying this type of show, staged in a way very distant from what we see happening today in galleries or museums. Tuesday to Sunday, from 10am to 1pm/2pm to 6pm. Technical sheet: Curated by Sara Antónia Matos.