Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

He studied sculpture at the FBAUL and earned an advanced course diploma in Visual Arts at the Maumaus School. The most expressive reading venue for his work is the American notion of achievement, which brings together art and sports and transfigures the work of art through the fascination with the artist's skills. Skills are that which become the most outstanding feature when we think of Bonfim (2004), a fishing boat covered with what reminds us of the traditional Brazilian Our Lord of Bonfim wrist-ribbons, or of A Culpa Não é Minha (It's not my Fault, 2003), an iron tree wrapped in rope, or even in initial works such as Can I Wash You?, a sort of coin made of blue-and-white soap bars, and Please Don't Go, a carpet made of chewing gum, both made in 1999, when he began his career. ¶ The relationship between art and physical performance becomes quite explicit in works such as Lick My Balls or Beefcake, from 2000, both associated with sports and also evocative of a certain gay imaginary, present in his works since the very beginning, in a militant or, yet more frequently, emotional stance. ¶ Proposing, insistently so, a neurotic revisiting of the Disney universes and Hollywoodian paradigms, João Pedro Vale (re)produces Dorothy's dress (Dorothy, 2001), devoid of its body, Ancient Roman quadrigs and other props from the love triumvirat between Julius Caesar, Marc Anthony and Cleopatra (Fatum Nos Coniuncturum Est, 2003), Sleeping Beauty's palace - which we learn that actually belonged to the infamous king Ludwig the 2nd of Baviera, under the name of Neuschwanstein (I Have a Dream, 2002) -, Pinocchio (When You Wish Upon a Star, 2001) or Scarlett O'Hara (Scarlett, 2002). ¶ Although these works trigger an ironic mechanism, content-wise, in formal terms they also produce a drive towards the amorphous and the undifferentiated, clearly breaking away from its cultural context and the associated commentary, in order to witness a Faustian inclination and a morbid obsession that becomes evermore tangible as also the more contrasted the corrupted motifs become.

{gallery}arte_artistas/galerias_artistas/joao_pedro_vale{/gallery}

Ficha Técnica | Credits

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

She studied at both the Fine Arts Schools of Lisbon and Porto, and she presently lives in Berlin, as she is doing a Master's in Visual Arts at the Hochshule der Kunst, HDK. ¶ César chose video as her main medium at an early stage of her career, focusing on the relationship between inner and outer space by transforming communication strategies into introversion strategies, as well as the other way around. ¶ The relationship themes that are always at the core of her work have led to a series of works in which the flâneur's digress is transformed into a "meeting". A "meeting", that is, with the perspective of the Other, as if one is that Other, who, always and ultimately, peers through the lens, which César simulates as if belonging to someone in particular. It is as if she's staging a persistent romantic ghost of a happenstance encounter, expressing nostalgia through the notions of community and communication. ¶ The most recurrent theme in her work is that of affection's "empty lots", places of the unfeasibility of communication, such as wide urban sidewalks, supermarkets, or waiting rooms. In such places, characters walk past by in an exercise of an alienating combination of aloofness and expectancy, of emptiness and promise. In Romance (2003), the artist combines two halves, which comprise views from a standard attending desk, and creates the illusion that the two people we see are actually dialoguing with each other, generating a "suspension of disbelief" that immediately moves the viewer. ¶ Although generally speaking we will find the author to have a voyeuristic perspective, by utilizing the other people's gaze and by creating the illusion of a relationship between the ones caught by the gaze, one can also find in her work some choices that imply stage directions. In Lull (2002), for example, César stages a waiting room and the customary characters. We can witness an inversion here: instead of simulating a fiction with documentary material, it is a document that is simulated with a fiction piece. ¶ The artist has recently attempted a combination of both affinities. With the goal of producing more complex work in a narrative sense, she gives a meta-fictional use to documentary mechanisms. In F for Fake (2005), one will find an additional layer of imagination over a movie that is already the fictionalisation of a documentary. The author is showing us that in our day and age of electronics there is no within or without in any given mechanism. Rather, to asking us whether, ultimately, the fictionalisation of a documentary of a fiction leads to yet another documentary or a work of fiction.

{gallery}arte_artistas/galerias_artistas/filipa_cesar{/gallery}

Ficha Técnica | Credits

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

He graduated in Sculpture at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon, and also completed the Advanced Visual Arts course at the Maumaus school. In his infant yet compelling career, he was awarded with the New Artists EDP Award (2002), and he was a Core Program resident in the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston (2003-2004) and the University of Arts Philadelphia (2007). Among the artists of his generation, he is one of the most internationalised, with participations in the 2002 Sidney and the 2005 Venice biennials. ¶ Having installation, often with integrated video, as his main field of action, he also employs a given appropriate object, photography or text, more often than not in a dialogue between text and sound. Many of his works have Opera as its particular reference; music, often worked under diverse manners, is a decisive component of his creation. Himself an Opera singer, the artist uses visual narratives as the central axis of his creative process, a play between the real and the fictitious, sound and silence, the feminine and the masculine, the intimate and the social. Whether metaphors of personal dramas (La Stupenda, 2001) or games of seduction (Dilema, 2004), his are works that question identity and fate, problematizing thus human condition and communication. In an attitude close to a heteronymic playfulness, the author personifies himself some of his characters, sometimes recurring to cross-dressing (Diva-a portrait, 2000, and Duettino, 2002), bringing to the public arena the issue of communicability and opening up a conception of art (and reality itself) as a product of a super-stage direction. The references to the Baroque period and the very scenographic dimension of Vasco Araújo's work become quite evident in installations such as Dilema (Serralves, 2004), with portraits of the artist interpreting the language of handfans, or Recital (2002), in which he recreates the ambient of a concerto room that functions as a structural analysis of the several instances of meaning that are constituted by the images, voices, sounds and texts from the operatic spectacle. In more recent works (The Girl of the Golden West, O Jardim, The Garden), the analysis of issues such as the communication and the confrontation between social roles becomes even more politicized, pointing towards other themes, as those of multiculturalism and post-colonialism. In 2006, he was in the shortlist for the BES Photo Award.

{gallery}arte_artistas/galerias_artistas/vasco_araujo{/gallery}

Ficha Técnica | Credits

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

Ficha Técnica | Credits

Rui Toscano Lisboa ¶ 1970

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

He studied painting and sculpture at Ar.Co and at the Fine Arts School of Porto. He had his first exhibitions in 1993 while still a student. At the same time he carried out his work as a visual artist, he sought out other creative undertakings, namely music and video jamming, and he became a member of several bands (such as the Tone Scientists) that had great impact on the domestic cultural scene. ¶ The author has revealed a great capacity in terms of exploring the most disparate of media, from drawing to multimedia installations, thus also revealing a creative power - in the classical sense of the word - albeit channelled through an obvious post-modern attitude. Before anything else, Rui Toscano is someone with a very clear understanding of contemporary experience and its related technologies. At the core of such an understanding lies the notion of a contemplation state that dispenses with the formerly related notion of interiority, and outright dismisses the individual. Consequently, attention from the part of the spectator no longer needs to imply any sort of intention. ¶ In works such as Infinity (2001), a video-landscape of the city of São Paulo projected on a cutout of the word INFINITY, Rio 09 May 2001 (2002), yet another video-landscape, this time around of Rio de Janeiro, My Bloody Valentine (2000) and The accelerating Collision of Future and Past in the Post-Modern Era (1997), Rui Toscano shows this new contemplation state as something with an alienating effect. This is the symptom of a technological sublime that was imposed on the individual in the true sense of the word, and it is in that sense that Rui Toscano becomes actually the most romantic of artists, given the fact he acknowledges his own romantic urges within his original radicalism (as in One hundred over the rainbow, 2000), precisely at a time when romanticism can only emerge as a sort of nostalgic projection of oneself. In T (1998), a self-portrait as a letter of the alphabet, or in Black Painting-Perfect Lovers (1997), the very notion of an "I" - an instance of introversion - externalises itself as an automatism. In the end of The Foyer Affair (2001), in which Rui Toscano appears as a film noir gangster, for example, he smokes a cigarette and fades to blue.

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Ficha Técnica | Credits

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

He completed his sculpture course at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon, and began his exhibition career in the second half of the 80s. In his first individual exhibitions, Chafes presented sculptures/constructions that literally occupied the whole of the show rooms, engaged completely in scale subversion and even in going beyond the exhibiting space. With meaningful disparities in the used materials (trunks and canes, HDF flakes, wood strips, plastic), in light and colour, the experience of forms was reaffirmed, forms whose organic, primitive origin is deduced and whose dynamics of growth and outburst hamper any kind of stable atmosphere, and are not able to imprison its existence within a protective cocoon. However, a certain tendency to the delimitation of the forms was already perceptible, and it is its development that would become his future, disciplined course as a sculptor. ¶ By the end of the 80s, he stills presents organic-suggestive forms, as if we were facing shells of the dead-born or the prostheses of crumbling humanoid machines, but in the last year of the decade he exclusively creates black-painted iron pieces, which becomes his stock-in-trade afterwards. ¶ In the work produced in the 90s, the most outstanding trait is his formal austerity and restraint, presiding over the creation of objects based on method-driven, rigorous drawings, and constructed along strict rules of symmetry and balance. In successive series of sculptures than often remind one of invocation places (habitation, contention, annihilation) for absent bodies, the sense of order exists in tandem with the evocation of violence, through the forms that resemble weapons and aggressions, and whose dimension of organic convulsion, despite its apparent coldness, imply a strongly felt physical and sensorial allure. ¶ In the last years, the artist has produced works of a grand scale, very often in dialog with the natural or architectural spaces in which they're exhibited. As paradigms for this phase, one should mention the large exhibition of his works at the Pena Palace and at the Natural Park of Sintra and works presented in the Netherlands and Belgium.

{gallery}arte_artistas/galerias_artistas/rui_chafes{/gallery}

Ficha Técnica | Credits

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

The artist, whose full name is Ricardo Gouveia, emigrated to San Francisco, United States, in 1985, where he consolidated a very consistent artistic career whose motivation is quite alien to the Portuguese national context. Graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, in a multicultural environment with strong underground and Hispanic references, the rhetoric that underlies his work is aimed at an ethnic affirmation that was never experienced by Portuguese society. The span of his work covers several territories, from comics to painting, but he focused mainly on public art, especially with mural painting and interventions in urban spaces, some of which were created with strong bonds to the local Hispanic community and with a clear-cut political agenda, such as One Tree (1995), at San Francisco's downtown. ¶ Throughout the last decade, his political stance has become also manifest due to the artist's connection, both artistically and personally, with Robert King, who was imprisoned for thirty years, and with Leonard Peltier, a Native American leader, both of whom Rigo considers to be political prisoners. ¶ Yet another cultural shock came about in Taiwan, where he travelled to in 1997, and where he developed a new series of works that widened once again Rigo's spectrum of cultural geography. ¶ In a moment when multiculturalism seems to be in the order of the day in all aesthetical and ideological debates throughout the world, it becomes rather enticing to follow a course in which one finds the mark of several peripheries and of successive distantiations and displacements. In 1994, at the Porta 33 gallery, in Funchal, Madeira, in an exhibition titled Largo do Canto do Muro (Plaza of the Wall's Corner), Rigo covered the floor with Portuguese cobblestone work whose pattern was close to that of a stylised sea, and upon which he wrote the names of many places and streets of Madeira's island. ¶ The ensemble of the artist's work was presented for the first time in Portugal in an remarkable exhibition curated by Manray Hsu in 2006, at the Centro das Artes Casa das Mudas, at Calheta, Madeira. Also in 2006, that same exhibition was adapted to the ZDB gallery, in Lisbon: Nada de Novo / Swim Again was curated by Manray Hsu and Natxo Checa, and it also included a series of urban interventions all over the city, some of which with a permanent character, such as the Europa Latina mural at the 24 de Julho Avenue.

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Ficha Técnica | Credits

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

After a course at Ar.Co and a short stay at the Royal College of Art in London, he entered the New York School of Visual Arts in 1997, where he remained for the ensuing six years. ¶ In 2004 he moved to Berlin. His is a solid international projection, both in galleries and museums. Highlights of his career are his participation in the 2003 Venice biennial and the 2004 São Paulo biennial, in both occasions invited by the international curators, Francesco Bonami and Alfons Hug respectively. ¶ Working mainly with drawing, Jorge Queiroz steps out of a chiefly post-surrealist and post-symbolic scene to trace a path of his own. One recurring trait throughout his artistic approach is the absence of any titles or any kind of account of his work, an absence that points out to an a-linguistic universe whose nature is absolutely devoid of narrative linearity. In his dream-like landscapes one finds no organization, no hierarchy, and both the figure-background and the inside-outside relations are subverted. What remains is only a plethora of lines, blots, and marks that seem to turn about their own innards. By evoking the alchemical world of a Klein bottle, a self-closed bottle which turns its mouth into itself and that was used by Duchamp in his studies on the fourth dimension, we can say that Jorge Queiroz' drawings attempt at tapping into that same fourth dimension, which is a mathematical possibility as well as an old, undying aspiration. ¶ By the continuous employment of the inversion of content and container, a perception of obscure energy is expressed, an energy that has been ever-present in the past century in the arts and sciences. Whether through outrageous notions such as ectoplasm or telekinesis or through extraordinary evidence, for example in the form of radioactivity, magnetism or electricity, a powerful imaginary becomes embodied that is both fantastic and phantasmatic. Jorge Queiroz is part of this imaginary, and he has shown us proof that contemporaneity is far, far from reaching a notion of identity as Form, of the I-skin, or of classicism.

{gallery}arte_artistas/galerias_artistas/jorge_queiroz{/gallery}

Ficha Técnica | Credits

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

He was an undergraduate student at António Arroio, in Lisbon, and finished his studies at Ar.Co, where he has been a teacher in the Sculpture Department since 1996, and from whom he received a scholarship to study at London's Royal College of Arts in 1992. Tropa was also the recipient of a 1995-1996 scholarship of the Alfred Topfel Foundation, of the Münster Kunstakademie. He has won several prizes, including the Amstelveen Award (1997) and the Drawing Award at the Caldas da Rainha biennial (1998). ¶ Although Tropa has been exhibiting since the late 80s, it was the subsequent decade that witnessed the growing recognition of his work, whether from the repeated participations in several collective exhibitions, whose high moment was the project he co-created with Lourdes Castro for the 24^th Biennial of São Paulo (1999), or from his participation in the 2003 Venice biennial with his Une table qui aiguisera votre appetit - Le poids poli (A table that'll whet your appetite. The polished weight). ¶ His work is usually focused on the modes of seeing and perceiving spaces, works into which the spectator is drawn in order to reconstruct or bring the work to a permanent conclusion. Therefore, each work must be considered as moment widened in time though restrained where it concerns the time given to the observation and the assimilation of its concepts. His works are, before all, "situations in process" which achieve their own sense through perception and experience. At a crossroads of performance and installation, Francisco Tropa creates ambiences that have a clear concern in understanding scientifically the volume that is occupied by the various objects, and by the behaviour they have within a given space (Aproximando pessoas creativas, Approaching creative people, 2002, Porta 33 gallery, in Funchal). The artist bestows upon his projects an elegance that is quite close to the Minimalist reductions, although one may find subtle references to the geometrising abstraction of the historical Avant-gardes. Density, gravity, mass, volume, space. Such are the keywords of Tropa's artistic lexicon, more often than not associated to motion-generating mechanisms. Nonetheless, the materials are quite diverse: as sound (Os Potes e Farol, The Vases and the Lightning House, 2002), words, water waves and dust, (Observatório de Pó, Dust Observatory, 1996). The methods are equally variable and in accordance to the accidents of the given work. If his works fulfil their significance at both a sensorial and cognitive level, it is through observation (Observatório de Insectos, Insect Observatory, 1996, and Projecto Casalinho, Casalinho Project, 1997); the spectator interacts and becomes one with the objects, in a process of self-knowledge.

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Ficha Técnica | Credits

Miguel Palma Lisboa ¶ 1964

	Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits: Abílio Leitão

He works and lives in Sintra, and has been exhibiting regularly since 1988. Mostly installations, his work is inscribed in the tradition of re-appropriation that strongly branded the 90s. The goal thereof was proportionately opposite to the progressive alienation carried out by contemporary production processes. In many of his works, one will realize an almost childlike awe with "doing", also noticeable in the wonderment for materials and for the do-it-yourself poise. Related to these notions, Palma more often than not produces scale models. To him miniaturization and modelling are part of the re-appropriation pulse, charged with a metonymic temperament. Actually, that is the compulsory condition for the existence of a model, the cornerstone of a scientific approach and of the experimental method, on which the author bases his own mode of production. ¶ Miguel Palma discloses an awkwardly uninhabited world, in which the machinic or the systematic are all-pervading and self-sufficient: human involvement is utterly stamped out. One just has to consider a few of his works, from Engenho (Engine, 1993), a craftsmanship car that can be driven through great distances, as the artist himself revealed in its inauguration journey, to Carbono 14 (Carbon 14, 1994), an archaeological section-cut model that displays several pieces of equipment from our own civilization as if buried under consecutive rock strata. This is revisiting that most modern of phantasms, which has not ceased to haunt us: the "bachelor machine". In truth, it is not a machine, but rather a figuration of the inhuman as existential closure. Miguel Palma's installations clear a line of vision to this distressing tension between the materials' burden, the density of things and the automatization of purposes. The work Secretária Ilustrada (The Illustrated Desk, 2003), a desk in whose writing surface a mini-landscape was inserted, acts as the witness of the aforementioned tension, in this particular case disguised as the strain between bureaucracy and the Romantic allure. In 2005 he developed Projecto Ariete, a road trip through Europe and its main museums in a vehicle altered by the artist.

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Ficha Técnica | Credits