Capítulo Gallery, Dacosta Gallery, 18th June and 13th September
This exhibition is organised by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s CAM, in collaboration with the Regional Secretariat for Education and Culture/Regional Directorate for Culture and the Museum of Angra do Heroísmo. It is curated by art critic José Luís Porfírio, and it revisits the centenary show organised by CAM in Lisbon, presenting two fundamental aspects of António Dacosta’s work: Calm and Restlessness.
In the commissioner’s words, ‘Calm’, in the Capítulo Gallery, is a contemplative space, a presence and memory of the South and of the island remembered both in Lisbon and in Paris, a maritime solar South of women, mermaids and various animals, of the water in the fountains, of the fire on the sea, where a stain becomes a landscape and the memory is the presence of a monument from Terceira; ‘Restlessness’, in the Dacosta Gallery, is the opposite of ‘Calm’ (1940) which prefigures an art which seriously questions the world with bewilderment, a world where the ‘Festa’ (Party) (1942) is a sign of bloody sacrifice in worship of both the artist and the place which, at the beginning of the 1940s and at the end of the 1980s, posed the great existential questions of life, always investigating, with a lucid gaze, his own death’.
