‘Sonetário’ is an artwork by Pedro Proença and is on show at the municipal gallery, Ala da Frente, in Vila Nova de Famalicão, until 9 February next year. The opening of the new exhibition at the gallery took place last Saturday, 19th October, with the presence of the artist.
António Gonçalves once again curate the new exhibition at the municipal gallery. According to the artist, the works ‘are the result of work based on the sonnet model and, in particular, on the work of the American psychiatrist Merrill Moore, who served as a focus of interest for Pedro Proença to promote the idea of sonnets and images that share the same space on the pages of a book’. ‘On display are drawings with stains that expand across the sheets of paper that will nevertheless be part of a book, in a relationship of coexistence between image and text,’ he adds.
In the exhibition's room sheet, the artist Pedro Proença lifts the veil a little on the elements that inspired him to create ‘Sonetário’. ‘There is something enigmatic, hieratic and priestly about books,’ he explains. ‘The images give us something concrete and universal in the face of the abstraction mechanisms of writing and verbal language, which are hostage to codes and codified meanings. What is proposed here is a kind of ‘self-museum’ of a (multi)personal delirium that I fell victim to about a year and a half ago and, in imitation of Moore, I called it Sonetário,’ he adds.
Pedro Proença was born in 1962 in Lubango, Angola, and in 1982, together with colleagues from the then Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa (now Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa), he created Movimento Homeostético, a group centred on painting, but multidisciplinary, performative and post-paradoxical. Since then, he has exhibited regularly in solo exhibitions at venues such as: Galeria Fúcares (1987), Frith Street Gallery (1989), Palazzo Ruspoli (1994), Gulbenkian Foundation (1984), Frankfurt Kunstwerein (1998), or in the monumental exhibition, ‘Riso dos Outros’, at the Eugénio de Almeida Foundation in Évora. His work is characterised by a multiplicity of styles and the exploration of interfaces (allegorical appearances) between the flows of writing and the fauna of images. The artist is also an illustrator, typographic creator, literary author and musician, among other talents.
Pedro Proença's ‘Sonetário’ exhibition is free to enter and can be visited from Tuesday to Friday, from 10am to 5.30pm, and at weekends from 2.30pm to 5.30pm, in the Front Wing, located in the Barão da Trovisqueira Palace (Bernardino Machado Museum), in Rua Adriano Pinto Basto, in Vila Nova de Famalicão.
