Mesa dos Sonhos: Duas coleções de arte contemporânea, by João Silvério, on display between May 20 and July 31, 2020, at Fórum Arte Braga, is an itinerant exhibition of the Serralves Foundation – Museum of Contemporary Art, with works from its collection, and the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD), both developed throughout the second half of the 20^th century to the present day.

This exhibition presents several artistic practices, such as drawing, photography, painting, sculpture or installation, of national and international artists. They are part of a specific context of Art History (from the 1960s to the present day), where there has been a clear change in the way art is done, thought and exhibited. Rosalind Krauss in A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999) adopts the concept of ‘post-media condition’, referring to the liquidity, intersectionality and multidisciplinarity in the visual arts since the second half of the 20^th century, using as an example the “expanded field of sculpture”. However, the artists also theorized about their production. Sculptor Robert Morris, in Notes on Sculpture Part II (1966), had already stated that sculpture was always a tactile medium, dealing with ‘the sculptural facts of space, light and materials’; Claes Oldenburg, in I am in for an art… (1961), had also advocated an “art that grows in a pot, that comes down out of the skies at night, like lightning, chat hides in the clouds and growls”. Or Sol LeWitt, in Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969), who said: “The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made”.

Art theory, over the last decades, is full of points of view. However, it may have a common origin, a “Table of Dreams”, as João Silvério mentions in the exhibition title, influenced by the homonymous poem by Alexandre O’Neil. The curator, in the exhibition text, underlines that: “The table is a common object, a space of encounter and communion, of celebration of life, the place of meals and rest of the hours that make up our daily lives. But the table can also be a place where we write, work, think and reflect, and also a place of recollection to dream”. This dreamlike world, exhibited at the Fórum Arte Braga in a white, clean and ample space, allows us to see each work singularly, in an environment of total concentration. We must remember Brian O’Doherty, in Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1999): “The art is free, as the saying used to go, ‘to take on its own life’”. As in Alberto Carneiro’s symbolic landscapes, in Meditação e posse do espaço-paisagem como obra (1977), but also in João Queiroz’s, in Sem título (from the series O ecrã no peito) (1999). Mirrors, as a metaphor for duplicity, in “Dentro de mim” (2001) by Helena Almeida and in Untitled (1995) by José Pedro Croft. The power of poetry, in A White Paper Will Blow Through the Street (1967) by James Lee Byars, or the works of Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos. Throughout the exhibition, the works communicate with each other and take our gaze through their shapes, such as Pedro Cabrita Reis’s A palavra inacabada (Uma luz interdita I) (1992), Marcelo Cidade’s Imóvel (2004) and Luísa Correia Pereira’s My Own Zoo (1977), as well as their colours. Note the red tone of the two paintings by José Pedro Croft, next to Pudor/ Desejo/ Esquecimento (1988) by Pedro Cabrita Reis, in front of Billboard Thailandhouse (2001) by Alicia Framis.

“Table of dreams in my body live/ All forms and begin/ All lives”, an excerpt from Alexandre O’Neil’s poem. It synthesizes this exhibition, the dialogue between two different collections of contemporary art, with various artistic practices, thoughts, and aesthetics, that acquire a new life in this exhibition.