TEXTS
Questions of the contemporary world
— Alberto Saraiva
Foreword - orun
— Raquel Valadares
Firmaments
— Mari Fraga, Paula Scamparini
Paula Scamparini: in a continuous blind spot and restart
— Clarissa Diniz
ship on canvas
— Fernanda Lopes
Restorations, returns and beginnings – critical iconography in Paula Scamparini
— Maria de Fátima Lambert
oca-oxalá: made in Portugal
— Lourenço Egreja, Clarisse Meirelles
orun
— Heloísa Meireles Gesteira, Paula Scamparini
words
— Fernanda Lopes
About hoods and light in the work of Paula Scamparini
— Sônia Salcedo del Castillo
the 23 nights
— Sônia Salcedo del Castillo
Restorations, returns and beginnings – critical iconography in Paula Scamparini.
Maria de Fátima Lambert
July, 2017
︎ projetc
The illustrations, the directed images, mainly reverberate in the two-dimensional works, proceeding from collections of validated Museums, that is, masterpieces. Also and sometimes, they are related to images of artifacts and other objects used in traditional or daily use, added by referentialities of the anthropological, ethnographic forum, promulgating ideological reasons, which are geostrategic in sociocultural terms, in a way so to speak. Not intending to analyze exhaustively this subject that brings together different approaches, but let’s note how loaded is the artistic intention of Paula Scamparini when exercising her right to choose in and on the images.
The Artist validates them by denouncing them, this is an almost paradox, so one might think. But that is not her scope. It is a work that calls for articulated and crossed methodologies, by means of a thought that has built up from its creative and personal assumption, driven by sociological and aesthetically political demands and designs.
The images on Paula Scamparini's tiles come from various sources, as mentioned above. To the illustrations of the Manuals of History, still used today in the Brazilian Schools, are added the misrepresentations that proliferate in the media, printed or audiovisual, social and webgraphic networks, assuming ungovernable contours. The exercise of the right of ownership over images disrupts any prior theories and performances of the Internet. It is the myth of possession, a paradoxical gluttony, as I have said in analogous writing contexts.
At the Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis three moments of Paula Scamparini's work are shown, works and an installation produced during her artistic residence in Oporto. At the first moment, in the Atrium of the Museum, the Brazilian artist exposes the books, the Manuals of History of Brazil, opened in the pages that show the illustrations transposed for the Azulejos [Tiles]. The books are protected [from time and weather] by the glass lid that prevents them from being veneered. The illustrations are frozen in their pages, doubly impeded before the public that can’t touch them. As the story is not touched on in its motto, one is only believed to be doing so.
In the second moment, the room where the famous painting titled “Mártir Cristão” (Christian Martyr), by Victoriano Braga, resides, there are clichés where news extracts chosen by Paula Scamparini are collected, fulfilling the purpose of declamatory about their references. The raw materials of ideas and affirmations that serve aesthetic and artistic purposes that are effectively intervening.
In the third moment, the Hall of Marques de Oliveira where the top, “Cephalous and Procris” dominate, we see a carpet of tiles reassembled following category criteria, where they stand out "problematic figures" (so the artist calls them), such as: The Captain of the Forest, Daughters, Free Negroes, Chargers, Indigenous, Jesuit Missions - cultural and religious domain...
It deals with figurations developed from real existences, with their causes and consequences, in a plot apparently managed between the real and the imaginary, where the doses of exoticism go in a collision course with the dispassionate lucidity of the ethical rigor of History in review And "uncritical decontamination," so to speak. The carpet or panel of tiles extends with thicknesses, textures and erasures that simulate, before the visitor's eye, a topography that oscillates between the times and the spaces, generating internal movements in History and by the Art. They are Restorations, recoveries not to fill in the same way as the things presented themselves, in their most evident skin, but to retake it in its essence and truth, beyond the representations. Although these have delayed and endured, establishing almost unshakeable convictions for some. Restore a stage of genuineness, questioner of the present and the rights that assist in a composite axiology of the Human.
The Artist validates them by denouncing them, this is an almost paradox, so one might think. But that is not her scope. It is a work that calls for articulated and crossed methodologies, by means of a thought that has built up from its creative and personal assumption, driven by sociological and aesthetically political demands and designs.
The images on Paula Scamparini's tiles come from various sources, as mentioned above. To the illustrations of the Manuals of History, still used today in the Brazilian Schools, are added the misrepresentations that proliferate in the media, printed or audiovisual, social and webgraphic networks, assuming ungovernable contours. The exercise of the right of ownership over images disrupts any prior theories and performances of the Internet. It is the myth of possession, a paradoxical gluttony, as I have said in analogous writing contexts.
At the Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis three moments of Paula Scamparini's work are shown, works and an installation produced during her artistic residence in Oporto. At the first moment, in the Atrium of the Museum, the Brazilian artist exposes the books, the Manuals of History of Brazil, opened in the pages that show the illustrations transposed for the Azulejos [Tiles]. The books are protected [from time and weather] by the glass lid that prevents them from being veneered. The illustrations are frozen in their pages, doubly impeded before the public that can’t touch them. As the story is not touched on in its motto, one is only believed to be doing so.
In the second moment, the room where the famous painting titled “Mártir Cristão” (Christian Martyr), by Victoriano Braga, resides, there are clichés where news extracts chosen by Paula Scamparini are collected, fulfilling the purpose of declamatory about their references. The raw materials of ideas and affirmations that serve aesthetic and artistic purposes that are effectively intervening.
In the third moment, the Hall of Marques de Oliveira where the top, “Cephalous and Procris” dominate, we see a carpet of tiles reassembled following category criteria, where they stand out "problematic figures" (so the artist calls them), such as: The Captain of the Forest, Daughters, Free Negroes, Chargers, Indigenous, Jesuit Missions - cultural and religious domain...
It deals with figurations developed from real existences, with their causes and consequences, in a plot apparently managed between the real and the imaginary, where the doses of exoticism go in a collision course with the dispassionate lucidity of the ethical rigor of History in review And "uncritical decontamination," so to speak. The carpet or panel of tiles extends with thicknesses, textures and erasures that simulate, before the visitor's eye, a topography that oscillates between the times and the spaces, generating internal movements in History and by the Art. They are Restorations, recoveries not to fill in the same way as the things presented themselves, in their most evident skin, but to retake it in its essence and truth, beyond the representations. Although these have delayed and endured, establishing almost unshakeable convictions for some. Restore a stage of genuineness, questioner of the present and the rights that assist in a composite axiology of the Human.