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Nas costas do viajante de Caspar Friedrich and Motel Coimbra #6 at the College of Arts of the University of Coimbra

Until January 26, 2024, the College of Arts at the University of Coimbra is holding two exhibitions. I will introduce them according to the spatial order in which they appear and, for that reason, I will first address the exhibition by Luís Silveirinha, which is housed in Quarto 22.

In Nas costas do viajante de Caspar Friedrich, we begin precisely with the well-known piece, seminal for German Romanticism, entitled Wanderer above the Sea of Fog from 1818. The twenty-two works on display by Luís Silveirinha look at the perpendicular nature of any journey, or the inescapable latency of both possible and impossible paths. What did this walker see during his journey? What did he choose to see? What did he choose not to see? What did he choose not to choose? Or, ultimately, what did he not choose to choose? The visitor is invited to travel a different route from this wanderer, but to follow in his footsteps, on an alternative path, through the pictorial flora created by Luís Silveirinha, whose depicted elements can ultimately lead to an inner journey, inextricably associated with that destiny forever ingrained in art history: the breathtaking landscape contemplated in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

We should also base our reflection on how Quarto 22 is occupied on the face/back dichotomy. We are not familiar with the wanderer’s face, but we do know the face of the painting representing him. If we connect the notions of truth and falsehood to the idea of face and back, we are forced to question where we should really be looking. António Olaio writes on the exhibition text: “On the back of a painted character stands the face of a painting and so is everything else“. The painting unavoidably stares us head on, revealing its face to us. That is the possible truth. And, if the unveiling of the face reveals a certain truth, any painting can only mislead us beyond the truth of the first encounter. A seemingly harmless truth, living on a glance and rarely perceived by the viewer. Shortly after that initial eye encounter, Sartre reminds us to look for the lie in, in this case, the pictorial.

The following exhibition, the sixth edition of Motel Coimbra, features the PhD students in Contemporary Art from the College of Arts working together in a group show that reflects their research, based on their artistic or curatorial activities. This sudden affinity between the exhibited pieces produces authentic dissonance in the venue, which naturally obstructs the intrinsic process of seeking harmony. They also reflect an artistic heterogeneity that appeases any fear that one day art will be swallowed up by the same premises, the same parameters. This motel, with its conceptually disjointed architecture, is proof that the crisis of artistic disciplines still favours diversity. A motel is a space of sudden and ephemeral relationships, but with a certain potential eternity. Once again, as António Olaio explains on the exhibition text: “And motels are just like that: places where people pass through, experience an adventure or just stay for a short while. Where one does not pick one’s neighbourhood, nor does it pick us, with whom we cross paths and of whom we can imagine a history or even an identity that only the image of their passage will provide us with. And this is the stuff that cinema, books, songs, and works of art are made of.

Motel Coimbra #6 proves the artistic polyphony that can be found in this PhD programme’s practices, bringing the notions of academic research and artistic practice closer together from its very first edition. With works by Adrián Montenegro, Alexandre Grave, Céu Gonçalves, Elisabete Magalhães, Emanuela Boccia, Filipe Neiva, Íris Faria, Júlio Cerdeira, Joana Pais, Lilian Walker, Marcelo Moscheta, Marcia Cattaruzzi, Nara Rangel, Pauliana Valente Pimentel, Paulo Emílio Com Dori Nigro, Puyuan Jiang, Ricardo Escarduça, Sandra Lessa, Valéry Karpan and Vítor Garcia.

Daniel Madeira (Coimbra, 1992) has a degree in Artistic Studies from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra and a Master's in Curatorial Studies from the Colégio das Artes at the same university. Between 2018 and 2021, he coordinated the Exhibition Space and the Educational Project of the Águeda Arts Center. Currently, he collaborates with the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra (CAPC).

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