The cycle of exhibitions and talks O Desenho como Pensamento is holding its fifth module until August 23, with solo exhibitions by Jorge Martins, Catarina Leitão and Pedro Valdez Cardoso.

Ontologically problematising drawing since its first edition, O Desenho como Pensamento invites artists whose work prioritises this technique, in a relationship based on the notion of an expanded field. This broadening also brings drawing closer to utilitarian practices, present in areas such as fashion or science, for instance.

This triad, whose exhibitions are open to visitors from July 15, has an ascendancy towards disruption. Let’s start with the exhibition Desenhar, destinar, desatinar (Drawing, destining, disrupting), by Jorge Martins, at Sala Estúdio of Centro de Artes de Águeda. There is an alliteration within the title: the verb of all these works suddenly appears next to other words that bring it to fruition: drawing will inevitably be destining and inescapably disrupting – a disruption perhaps related to an inability to grasp the real. Merely to say drawing is not to say drawing – the gesture enabling it to be understood and illustrated is absent. Between figurations and abstractions, Jorge Martins displays monochromatic works that shed light on part of his vast output. As Celso Martins told the newspaper Expresso about the exhibition A Substância do Tempo in 2013, Jorge Martins’ drawing is a “porous setting, open to all visual codes and rumours (from cinema to photography, from graphic design to painting). […] In these images, we sometimes catch the echo of a cinematographic light, the experience of a minimalist sculpture or a quote borrowed from theory or literature which is visually confronted”.[1]

In Sativa, by Catarina Leitão, at Escola Superior de Gestão de Águeda – University of Aveiro [ESTGA-UA] and Biblioteca Municipal Manuel Alegre [BMMA], the radicalisation of drawing is heightened, the result of the artist’s body of work: Catarina Leitão’s work ranges between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, among drawing, sculpture, installation and book. In Sativa, the work at ESTGA-UA is a prelude to what can be seen later, at BMMA – as if it were something sown in our eyes to grow later, after all the viewer is presented with an ambience easily related to botany.

Finally, Pedro Valdez Cardoso presents Slow, at Salão de Chá do Parque Alta Vila, Águeda, a place built at the end of the 19th century that retains the same features of that era. At first, we see two works – the first emerges with a series of horizontal insoles, revealing an apparent brick-like texture, and another work, with two vertical insoles. On the latter we read the words FORWARD and BACKWARD embroidered.

Inside the hall’s central area, we find sun loungers – an element usually associated with the outside of a house – also embroidered, but with natural landscapes in the area where we would rest our backs. While behind these objects, we see that the lines keep going, in a motion dictated by gravity. Pedro Valdez Cardoso fills the space with elements that blur the notion of exterior and interior, almost transforming dualisms into dualities, bringing together aprioristically dissonant concepts such as inside and outside, front and back, retreat and advance, nature and human construction.

The second edition of O Desenho como Pensamento, with artistic direction by Alexandre Baptista and organised by Centro de Artes de Águeda/Águeda City Hall, University of Aveiro and Albergaria-a-Velha City Hall, will also feature the works of Jorge Queiroz, Pilar Mackenna and Cristina Massena in the next and last module of solo exhibitions, between September 2 and 30.

[1] Martins, Celso – “A Substância do Tempo”, Expresso/Cartaz, 13-04-2013