When Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra revealed the artists selected, by open call, for the exhibition É Urgente o Amor – curated by Lígia Afonso (Lisbon, 1981), held at CAPC’s headquarters -, the institution was flirting with a renewal of the city’s art scene.

The list combined names with different present-day creative energies and, for the most part, centred on up-and-coming artists. As such, É Urgente o Amor features the work of Adrián Montenegro (Pasto, Colombia, 1986), Cláudia Santos (Coimbra, 1981), Diogo Nogueira (Porto, 1999), Bartolomeu Gusmão (Lisbon, 1993), Fernando Travassos (Coimbra, 1990), Gil Mac (Coimbra, 1975), Ricardo Seiça Salgado (b. 1973), Francisco Brandão (Minas Gerais, 1994), Luís Silveirinha (Campo Maior, 1968), Sebastião Castelo Lopes (Lisbon, 1994), Sofia Moço Novo (Coimbra, 2000) and Teresa Luzio Morais (Santarém, 1976).

On October 5, 2024, CAPC opened an exhibition at its headquarters – Portugal’s first contemporary art museum, established in 1958 in a 1930s mansion – with several revelations interacting in a fast-paced exhibition fabric.

The same day, a few metres away from the headquarters – in Círculo Sereia, the most recent building of Círculo de Artes Plásticas -, the solo exhibition of well-known photographer Jorge Molder (Lisbon, 1947) entitled Grandes Planos was also unveiled, displayed in a white cube covered in black and white photographs and sporting a well-defined and straightforward expography pattern. Somehow, Círculo Sereia ultimately suggests Grandes Planos as a sort of expographic inversion of what happens   in the headquarters exhibition: Molder’s work emerges as a negative compared to the concept of É Urgente o Amor, making its ‘plan’ even bigger.

The exhibition at CAPC’s headquarters is conceptually derived from the verses of Eugénio de Andrade (Fundão, 1903-2005) and bears the same title as one of his poems.

As with the majority of the poet’s oeuvre, this poem pursues a sense of purism and clear-cut images:

‘Love is urgent
A boat at sea is urgent
To destroy certain words is urgent,
hatred, loneliness and cruelty,
some lamentations, many swords
[…]’

This well-illustrated poetic assumption is also reflected in the exhibition, which opted to include a good figurative pace, with little abstraction and almost no geometry. Works with an immersive predisposition: some invite the visitors to immerse themselves in the materials used for the narrative.

The exhibition route starts with a video in the dark room of the house, near the entrance, as is customary at Círculo. This time the room is filled with Super 8 by Teresa Luzio de Morais.

The second work that can be seen on the tour, in the first corridor of the house, is also a video, a sign of the pace of the tour, a hyper-enriched ambience. It is clear at this point that the narrative involves the ‘urgency’ of Andrade’s verses.

As for ‘love’… what is love?

In this second video featured in É Urgente o Amor, the work Escuta (2024) by Cláudia Santos focuses on the love described by sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (Poznan, Poland, 1925 – 2017): liquid love.

This video, specifically, apart from liquidity, also suggests an idea of ‘not fitting in’ in a limited and impermanent place, in contradiction to Eugénio Andrade’s verse: ‘love is urgent it is urgent to remain’.

The work also hints at fluidity. A certain kind of sensuality, which was clearly shown when the audience, on the opening day, walked down the stairs of CAPC’s ground floor and encountered the work of Francisco Brandão, throbbing with the performance of Pernambuco dancer Tutto Gomes (Vicência, Brazil, 1976).

Brandão’s A última gota (2022) is a red inflatable item that hardens and shrivels depending on the pressure of a pump. The concept of tension is reminiscent of the eroticism of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘great glass’ (Blainville, 1887-1968). The ‘great glass’, concluded with a crack and whose real name is The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (1912-1923). At CAPC, Tutto Gomes domesticated the bomb of Brandão’s ‘last drop’, conjuring up properties that have been widely studied in the field of psychoanalysis and which are inherent – and often neglected – to desire.

The upper floor of Círculo de Artes is the most regular, immersive and interactive part of É Urgente o Amor’s narrative.

The smaller rooms were filled with the work of the very promising Sofia Moço Novo called Distribuição de bons presságios (2024), and the other with the solid production of the trio Fernando Travassos, Gil Mac and Ricardo Seiça Salgado. The latter, in a performance of their installation-game Let`s do it. Let`s fall in love. Amor é #0 (2024), brought a great deal of truth. In one particular moment, when the room was covered in smoke, with the audience in wonder, I witnessed a discreet, non-rehearsed kiss, which moved me greatly and I thought: ‘’That’s love‘’. Beautiful.

In the constellation of É Urgente o Amor, the major gravitational pull of the exhibition is the sequence of six paintings by the duo Diogo Nogueira and Bartolomeu Gusmão. These panels, hanging from ropes and dancing in the wind, recall the rawest works of Eugène Delacroix (Saint-Maurice, 1978-1863). They also recall the vision of Henri Matisse (Le Cateau, 1869-1954), when he saw The Golden Bough (1834) by William Turner (Covent Garden, 1775-1851) to create his work The Joy of Life (1834).

The exhibition alludes to the ‘’joie de vivre‘’, not least because, in a life radically joyful and alive, the urgency of love is a sine qua non, if it starts from the inside out. Perhaps joy is having a profound self-knowledge and self-love, before any open call.