Rigo

Rigo Madeira ¶ 1966

	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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