GAU Vol 02 - English version by GAU galeria de arte urbana

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GALERIA DE ARTE URBANA

2013

ALMADA POR SE7E CORREDOR VERDE PANTÓNIO

GAU | GALERIA DE ARTE URBANA

ON THE WALLS...

AMADORA COMICS FESTIVAL In its 12th edition, Amadora Comics Festival challenged GAU, to join the figures that live in comics universe, to the ones who frequent street art world. Between these two territories that flow together, not only from distinct plastic speeches, but also from the two cities involved, we tried to build a bridge, bringing to the capital the comics illustrator, Richard Câmara, and taking to the Festival, the street artist, AkaCorleone. The first one, implanted in the Urban Art Gallery, the evocation of one of the symbolic figures of the comics universe - a Mickey Mouse in its original version with a Pinocchio’s nose where ironically, several planes take off, playing around with subjects, such as weaponry. AkaCorleone in turn, ignited a wall at Fórum Luís de Camões in Amadora with an unexpected palette. Its piece coexists, on one hand with a vast and revolutionary muralist tradition, and on the other hand, with the absence of contour, monochromatic stains, transparencies, abstract patterns, arrows, and a “BANG”. This elements seems to reflect in Corleone’s artwork, his heritage from graffiti, screen printing, comics, perhaps even from cubist painting.

Richard Câmara

AkaCorleone

MAR | THERE IS ONE IN ALL OF US Lisbon received a new piece of urban art authored by Gonçalo MAR, in the gable of a building located in Alcântara area. The work, we consider a renewal aesthetic of that place also provides to a wider audience the opportunity to enjoy the work of this recognized national author and enriches the city’s urban landscape. During four days, the execution of this intervention brightened the location. The colourful figures inspired by the universe of comics that appeared, surprised the local residents, traders and passersby who expressed their appreciation for the initiative. The artistic intervention was supported by the Urban Art Gallery and marked another solo exhibition of this artist in Lisbon, entitled “There is one in all of us” and held at the Contemporary Art Gallery INFLUX.

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GAU | GALERIA DE ARTE URBANA

RAM E KLIT | ÍRIS FLOWER It seems unlikely, but we now have a Green Corridor to join the top of Parque Eduardo VII to the hill of Monsanto! It seems unlikely, but past three decades since the design of this project, [the Portuguese architect] Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles sees his idea materialized! It seems unlikely, but there are 6 km with gardens, cornfields, orchards, bike paths, pedestrian bridges, playgrounds and urban art! It seems unlikely, but GAU invited two road fellows that didn´t gathered for a long time to perform several walls! And if we think of gardens, trees and flowers, within the universe of national street art, on whom do you think about? RAM and KLIT worked in one gable in Campolide Street and on a building next to the skate park, just behind the Palace of Justice [the main Lisbon’s courthouse]. Blooming something simultaneously human and vegetal, KLIT drew a wave made of petals and leaves in green and navy blue that grows and drags a huge iris, inscribed by RAM. The “Flor de Íris” [Iris Flower] was thus planted, on a compromise between the hands and cans of both, in the symbiosis that returns us to a primordial nature, and in the promise that the Green Corridor materializes an ecological looking over the city.

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ON THE WALLS...

BLUE WALL FACES PROJECT The wall of Lisbon’s Psychiatric Hospital Center (CHPL) continues, continues, and continues for over a km. In a certain point, a deep navy blue begins to cover it and the faces come in order to stare at us. In this wall, we observe and are observed because this wall is a mirror. In this wall, each person prefers a figure with whom it identifies most. And every one sees the faces that want to see in the faces that the creators designed. Once again in a collaboration between CHPL and GAU, was launched a call for a second round of artistic interventions, and the jury selected 12 proposals authored by Another, Cripsta & Dilen, Draw, Drawing Jesus, Eime & Add Fuel, Graffiti 360 crew, Maio, Raf, Robô, Smile, Tinta Crua and Zela. If each portrait encloses all forms of the world as pointed by José Gil [in the book «Sem Titulo» - Escritos sobre Arte e Artistas, published by Relógio d´Água, in June 2005, by this recognized Portuguese author], then many are the street art worlds pictured here. With our thanks to all authors who have left their contributions, the wall will continue, within a short time, trough the opening of a new section devoted to the same theme.

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Draw

Smile

Drawing Jesus

Robô

Graffiti360

Another

Zela

GAU | GALERIA DE ARTE URBANA

Raf

Add Fuel e Eime

Maio

Cripsta and Dilen

Tinta Crua

Niels Shoe

C215

LISBON IS THE PLACE! In the domain of graffiti and street art, Lisbon continues to be one of the destinations chosen by the major international artists. Over recent months, the city has seen to materialize in its streets, pieces of the Dutchman Niels Shoe, one of the references in the calligraphic production, by invitation of the Eurobest Festival, which had the support of GAU. The French author C215, great figure in creating stencil, by the invitation of Lara Seixo Rodrigues, also in collaboration with GAU. The Italians artists Cripsta & Dilen in response to the call for the “Blue Wall Faces Project”, and very recently also the French creator M. Chat surprised to Lisbon with his smiling cat.

M.Chat

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GAU | GALERIA DE ARTE URBANA

URBAN ART EXIBITION 2013

“ALMADA POR SE7E” “Almada por se7e” [Almada by seven] inaugurates the 2013’s exhibition cycle of Urban Art Gallery, integrating the celebrations of 120 years of the birth of Almada Negreiros with interventions in the panels located at Calçada da Glória e Largo da Oliveirinha. In the context of a career marked by a strong heterogeneity and a radical vanguard that invites to a constant revisiting, GAU set the challenge to seven national artists - Fidel Évora, João Samina, Mário Belém, Miguel Januário, Pantónio, Tamara Alves and Pedro Batista - to reinterpret some iconic pieces and themes of that author. Opening the show, Pantónio works the theme of marshalling sea universe, ensnaring ropes, moorings and other naval elements in a bone and floating bilge which is guided by a female figurehead. Marked by a stripped-down palette that evolves between black and white predominantly, to red and blue in a few notes and a almost fainted pale green water background, the artist tells us about the creative process of this piece: “I tried to see beyond the visual richness from the original theme and synthesize all that frenzy. I concluded that what he drew was the will, the drive, and the sea as a subsistence wealth, a border and a social ability. And then I realized that was enough for me to go there and draw what was already natural in my themes: the will to navigate and to overcome. He did not like it much, but I will challenge him one day to exchange positions to see if it is easy for him!” The following is the work of Mário Belém, where the painting of the female figure, lavishly crafted by Almada, is evoked. In a choppy sea, a small boat inhabited by two Tagus nymphs heads towards the unknown side of the moon. One figure is conducted, abandoned in a languid gesture, the other figure that leads the vessel, is blindfolded, but her body believes and leans in the effort to reach. In the words of Mario: “My starting point was the issue that you have given me - that picture you showed me of the Bristol Club [Almada de Negreiros, Decorative Painting Nude, 1926] - and then I’ve done a lot of research about the things of Almada and found a text he wrote for the first Orpheu Magazine entitled “Canção da Saudade” and that is brilliant. (...) There is a passage that says “If I were blind I would love everybody” and the one that set the tone to the whole work was “I love the side of the moon that I’ve never seen.” In the third panel, Miguel Januário in his domain of “Kissmywalls” worked symbolically one of the Portuguese literature’s reference “Manifesto Anti-Dantas” and the graphic production of Almada. PIM! – Is there any other interjection that remembers Almada better? Is there something that reminds us better the ballast of his notable rebellion? It was precisely this word that Miguel decided to return to, inscribing it between the typesetting hand, the radiography of the young futuristic author and the fragmented architecture of a generation in collapse. Thus, the artist explains to us that towards GAU’s invitation to participate in this exhibition - “The interpretation has plenty of paths ... and the challenge was how to get fit in the language itself, discovering what we wanted to identify, seek our interpretation, finding one result, this special result”. Further on, delivers his opinion in relation to this artwork -”I

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tried to represent the idea and form of the Manifesto, (...) the idea of structure and revolution.” The responsibility was enormous, as we know, because we suggested to João Samina, to create something from geometric abstraction conceived by Almada Negreiros. Works such as “ O ponto de Bauhütte”, or “A porta da harmonia” or “2R= 2 0/9 + 0/10” or the ultimate mural “Começar”, haunted his mind and still do. Then it was reaching an amazing crossroad between the mathematical look of Almada and expressive gesture of João. As if the gesturalism used in the background, full of run-off and choreography coagulated at the surface of this artwork in a supremacist explosion. This is undoubtedly the “Começar” [the last mural work of Almada Negreiros] of João Samina, which immediately understood that - “(...) I will not replicate a geometric abstraction of Almada, but I will make my geometric abstraction referenced in a survey that was taken by Almada. And the interesting thing is that I think he had never completed ... is a bit what happens to me: I’m always looking for something, then I paint it and the next day it think I would have done it a totally different way.” “Since my theme is the fashion costumes, I decided to take nudity as a form of protest. The nakedness as part of nature, as an ideal of beauty. The first clothes were those made of animal skins caught by man, in this case I recall the law of survival, the fittest survive and the weak are eaten by larger animals (The concept I tried to represent from the beginning was “eat or be eaten “- fashion’s dog-eat-dog world ... and not only). When we are naked, we are on the same level as any other animals, other species. And finally in the contemporary trend, tattooing and piercing were intensified by assuming nudity as a possible way to maintain an identity (...).” The words are from Tamara Alves and we do not need to add much, maybe just referring to the nagging attack, the passion, the pathos that the author left on the arena in the only vertical panel of GAU. In the Largo da Oliveirinha, the contrast could not be greater between the two panels - Pedro Batista stripped himself, Fidel Évora accumulated in. Pedro resigned and reaches a work of great formal frugality; Fidel collected and staged an overflowing “cabinet de curiosités”. And in a sense, the issues raised in these two parts have some proximity: for Pedro, the field of self-portrait that Almada large and diversely worked throughout his career, and for Fidel, commedia dell’arte subject and all the figures of harlequins, columbines, pierrots and all the characters with which Almada identified himself and was recurrently representing. “My piece is like a theatre scene, a very crowded play which occupies the whole screen, so each person can make their own interpretations and can read it in their own way.” said Fidel, and Pedro points “I wanted to portray the different stages in Almada, when he was young and when he was older. Get together his photography and his self-portraits, the way I see him. There is a symbiosis between the vision of himself as an artist and as a man, with my personal vision.” In the end this was what we wanted with this exhibition, a game of mirrors between Almada and the other SE7E [the other seven authors].

Tamara Alves

Pedro Batista

Fidel Ă&#x2030;vora

Pant贸nio | Rua D. Lu铆s i, Lisboa, 2013, Fotografia do autor

Pantónio

Mário Belém

Miguel Januário

João Samina

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...BEYOND THE WALLS RECYCLE YOUR SIGHT Within the program “Enamorados por Lisboa “ [“Falling in love by Lisbon”], the municipal action to commemorate the S. Valentine Day, the 5th phase of the action “Recycle your sight” was held in February. The initiative saw remarkable success, since the number of candidates to paint one recycle bottle container exceeded the 50 units available for this purpose, which confirms the population great adhesion to this project and his desire to leave a personal mark on city, leading GAU to a perspective its continuity for soon.

Hugo Henriques

Vítor Santos

Susana Costa e Ana Gil Pires

Nuno Coelho

Robô

MEGAPHONE LECTURES Roundtable “Creativity or Business as Usual?” @ Portuguese Catholic University GAU was invited by the Creative and Cultural Management Club from Portuguese Catholic University, to participate in the roundtable with the subject “Creativity or Business as Usual? “, which also included the participation of the artist Sofia Areal, Manuel Veiga from the Cultural Counsellor’s Office of Lisbon’s Municipality and the teacher Celine Abecassis-Moedas. “Urban art goes to school!” - Presentation at Sampaio Garrido Primary School In January, GAU visited the Primary School Sampaio Garrido, and spent a lively morning with 50 students from the 1st year, explaining what is urban art and the importance of protecting the cultural heritage. Our thanks to the teachers, educational assistants and children involved in the initiative.

VISITS Guided tour of urban art with youngsters from Santos-o-Velho Parish In partnership with Santos-o-Velho Parish, GAU

conducted a guided tour with thirty youngsters. During the morning, we traveled by bus throughout key pieces of urban art in the city and in the afternoon the activities continued through the painting of a bottle recycle container, located in the neighborhood of Madragoa. Urban Art “CycleChic” Ride In the context of “Enamorados por Lisboa” program, the Urban Art Gallery in partnership with Lisbon CycleChic association, organized a tour by some of the major urban art interventions in the city. The means of transport chosen was the bike, ideal for the moving around in the city, perfect for enjoying graffiti and street art. Guided urban art tour with students from Carcavelos High School A group of 50 young people from the Tourism Course this School, accompanied by their teachers come with GAU to visit some works of urban art in Lisbon. Since we were in the presence of future professionals in the field of tourism, we tried to make them aware of the growing importance in the panorama of the city, which the urban art pieces have been acquiring.

INVENTORY One of the main goals of GAU is to survey the records of urban art in the city since 1974 to the present day. We intend to register not only the manifestations of urban art that are presently in the public space, but also due to their transitory nature, those that were lost over time. Inventory records can be found on the website of GAU timeline. In order to expand the number of urban art inventory, we appeal for the collaboration of all stakeholders in this artistic universe, for sending photos of the pieces, to this email: gau@cm-lisboa. pt.

GAU ART COLLECTION The Urban Art Gallery is building a collection which currently includes works donated by the artists Gonçalo Mar, José Carvalho, Miguel Ayako, Miguel Januário, Nomen and RAM to whom we are very grateful. We plan to organize an initiative with this set of art pieces and those that may still come to integrate it, to continue to promote the artistic production of national writers.

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GAU | GALERIA DE ARTE URBANA

INTERVIEW WITH... PANTÓNIO Through the images illustrated in this magazine vol.02 of GAU, we realize that Pantónio really has synthesis capacity and is fitness to create an iconic image then persists in our memory, which then unfolds into meanings. We realize that Pantónio has such talented hands and an accurate look forms on what we all wanted to say and do, but do not know how. We realize that Pantónio has a unique sense of timing, working about the random as few. Pantónio, we have already realized that this city owes you some compelling pieces in the history of its urban art. 1. How and when did your stage name appear? It emerged in the way that pleases me most, someone called me PANTONIO naturally. I started working in the graphic department of a company and did a tantrum for them to invest and buy colour catalogues, specifically Pantone catalogues, which are expensive. After this, a good mood colleague gave me this nickname. I like it, because a simple “P” adds a character nature to my name, it’s not foreignism, and indeed if we remove the vowels and we play to hang with the P and T, we can write Portugal. It also reminds me of pantomime that is to communicate without words and that is more or less what I do, and draws are a gesture. 2. You were born in the Azores. How did you get out of the islands to the mainland? Yes, I’m from Terceira Island, São Mateus fishing village. I left the Azores at the right time in the best way: I left at 16 years old, to go to school to study Artistic Crafts in Vila Nova de Cerveira. I went by the insistence of artists who were friends of my parents and of teachers who already saw me skipping classes or going sleepy on them, because of spending the night before drawing and go stealing fences and gates to neighbours to make grids for frames and other things to do experiments. It was very good because I left the purview of parents, to become independent and meet and have as teachers the ones who were the artists that I admired, at an age of idealism too. So I took it all and lived what had to live at the right time. I remember I had the idea that all people on the mainland were very interesting, because everyone had access to culture, media,

Rua José Gomes Ferreira

Fotografia do Autor

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Rua da Cintura do Porto de Lisboa

GAU | GALERIA DE ARTE URBANA

cinema, so much at the time, that we hadn’t at the Islands, but I quickly realized that all these means did not mean that much richness. 3. How is your creative process, how do you arrive to the ideas and subjects you treat? And what is the contribution of chance or coincidence in all that? I cannot understand my creative processes. I try to understand it but I do not have control on it. I know that it is quite exhausting, and I would like to find a recipe or a system that facilitate the process. I think I am very sharp-eyed of the surroundings and feel its suggestions, then I start to construct hypotheses, connecting points of what is at right and at left; study designs, comeback to the places again and observe the site, preferably on foot; then back to my enclosure again; leave to like the initial idea; I lie down and close my eyes and then I jump and say eureka. Sometimes it’s easier, and with all the luck I have, is the solution that comes to me: someone offered me a stone in a land of stones, and then it’s all settled, a process of truth for me and for others. 4. What is special in street work? Tell us a little about your last piece “Canhão-Lápis” [Cannon-pencil]? The street work requires me to be less umbilical and to communicate, to be practical and play - its fun and physical. In studio work sometimes I create a cocoon and addictions, and that does not please me. This piece, in that area, came by to notice that in the area of Santos, one area where there are two schools of design, ETIC and IADE, and apparently no concept worked paintings.It was my way of telling students that pass through it, that at a time of “war” as it is this that we live, they have a great tool in their hands, indeed powerful tools nowadays that they can use for good causes. This is why I draw those little flowers to camouflage the cannon. 5. How you see urban art in Lisbon today? By the amount of emails I get from foreign artists wishing to come to Lisbon on purpose to paint, I think urban art in Lisbon is very well of visibility. GAU is a good bridge to be able to do legal work and thought out concept. Despite that Portuguese stigma to do always what happens abroad, I have seen many authors assume icons and subjects of our culture. It is a good opportunity for us to show that we are more than hand labor, that we are ideas and creativity. Photograph of the Author

Rua José Gomes Ferreira

Praça dos Restauradores, Fotografia do Autor

Photograph of the Author

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OBSERVATORY

Tinta Crua

LowBros e Hium

Author Unknown, Photography GAU

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Chinijos, Photography GAU

GAU | GALERIA DE ARTE URBANA

Nomen, Slap e Kurtz

Ninguém

Goo... Fotografia da GAU

BOOKS & EDITIONS

Regg e Violante

Title: Porque Pintamos a Cidade? Uma Abordagem Etnográfica do Graffiti Urbano Author: Ricardo Campos The contemporary graffiti is a typically urban phenomenon. We travel to different cities and are constantly surprised by enigmatic signs and colorful characters that lurk in the most unlikely places. Certainly many have already asked about its meaning and purpose. This book aims to answer these questions. Based on a research conducted recently, it attempts to understand the practices, representations and motivations of young people who paint our cities. Title: From Style Writing to Art: A Street Art Anthology Author: Magda Danysz (in collaboration with Mary-Noëlle Dana) “In the beginning, there was tagging and writing on walls. Which gave birth to Style Writing and Graffiti. Which turned into what is now generally and too simply known as Street Art. Which is a complex and interesting art movement that, if anything, deserves a lot more than a shortcut. This book is 400-pages long. In it, you will find a history of Street Art, 200 illustrations and 50 artist biographies. Each biography covers their artistic career and a personal style review, as well as an artwork analysis section that helps to understand how each of these artists is a master of the genre.”

WEB

maismenos+

h2tuga - http://www.h2tuga.net muralarts - http://muralarts.org brooklynstreetart - http://www.brooklynstreetart.com thisiscolossal - http://www.thisiscolossal.com streetartlondon - http://streetartlondon.co.uk

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GAU | GALERIA DE ARTE URBANA EDITORIAL

TO BE CONTINUED…

Among the initiatives that mark these last six months, we highlight “Almada por se7e”, the new thematic exhibition patent in the panels of GAU, which integrates the Commemorations of 120 years of the birth of Almada Negreiros.

In the initiatives that celebrate its 20 years, the magazine Visão in partnership with GAU, promoted a improbable meeting between the writer José Luís Peixoto and ARM Collective, the Portuguese duo of street artists. The universe of pop-surreal from MAR fused with the atmospheric aqueous abstraction from RAM in a dialogue with the renowned Peixoto lyricism, find their place in the means that are usual - the book pages and the plaster of a wall in Lisbon!

In the context of a work guided by a strong heterogeneity and a radical vanguard that invites a constant revisiting, GAU challenged seven artists - Fidel Évora, João Samina, Mário Belém, Miguel Januário, Pantónio, Tamara Alves and Pedro Batista - to reinterpret some of the iconic pieces of that author.

Soon you will see the result of the competition to choose the best proposal for artistic intervention at the wall located at the top of the Calçada Poço dos Mouros [Walk of Poço dos Mouros], resulting from the partnership between GAU and the Parish of Penha de França. The “Lagarto da Penha” [Penha’s Lizard], legend associated with the history of the place, was the theme chosen for the contest and the theme for the intervention.

In the second phase of the project “Faces of the Blue Wall”, we repeated the theme, but we diversified the authors, through a new form of participation. Elected by a jury of elements by GAU, by the Psychiatric Hospital of Lisbon and by the writer Nomen, a pioneer in national graffiti, were performed over 12 works not only by local artists, but also by authors from Oporto and from Milan, in this endless wall dedicated the urban art. No longer at the blue wall, but at the Green Corridor, another pair of great quality - RAM and KLIT - planted “iris flowers” on the path that goes from the Palace of Justice to Monsanto. Also by this time, the city welcomed other interventions by a diversity of creators such as MAR, Pantónio, Niels Shoe, Richard Câmara. In the wake of the partnership strategy we have been developing and following the release of the first issue of the GAU, submit this magazine to the gaze of graduates in Flag’s Academy of Design and Communication, to welcome reinterpretation of its graphics. Promoting creativity has always guided the position of the Gallery in all its areas and we wanted to reaffirm it in this publication. Here is the result of this fruitful collaboration. Thanks to the contribution of the two young designers. Jorge Ramos de Carvalho

Photography by Miguel Carrelo

TECHNICAL FORM GAU vol 02 – April de 2013 Biannual publication Urban Art Gallery Edition of the Lisbon Municipallity Cultural Council of Lisbon Municipallity Municipal Direction of Culture Department of Cultural Heritage Director - Jorge Ramos de Carvalho Associate Director - Sílvia Câmara Copywriting- Inês Machado, Miguel Carrelo, Patrícia Sousa, Sílvia Câmara Graphic Design - Ivo Almeida e Miguel Pedro Secretariat- Gracinda Ribeiro