Painting
Pedro Abreu
26th to 29th of May | Átrio Centro Cultural Jonh dos Passos | Painting | Indoor
From an early age, Pedro Abreu showed a great appetite for drawing and art. In the mid 90s, when he went to Lisbon to study, he found in the museums, galleries, and city, the inspiration, the desire, and the incentive to dedicate and deepen his knowledge in painting./p>
He deepened his knowledge in the techniques of watercolour and oil painting, which made color an increasingly prominent element in his works. On a trip to Venezuela, he visited Patanemo Bay, where he was part of a circle of artists of various nationalities who worked together. It was a group that promoted conviviality and the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and techniques. This experience accentuated even more of his will to express himself with color.
Pedro Abreu is an artist whose style can be described as figurative expressionist, in which warm and strong colours make his paintings vibrate. He has participated in several group and private exhibitions in England and Portugal.
The Aqui Acolá Festival presents his work in the town where he was born, and where he lives, in Ponta do Sol. His unique exhibition that will not leave anyone indifferent.
Fátima Spínola - ACAPPELLA | À CAPELA
26th to 29th of May | Capela de S.António | Pintura | Indoor
ACAPPELLA | À CAPELA is a photography and sound installation art project that was designed specifically for the Aqui_Acolá Festival. Part of a photographic series that began in 2017 and was published in the same year in the Fanzine "O Dedo", which gave rise, in late 2018, to paintings from her exhibition LIXO | Trash.
This installation evokes, not only the devaluation of female artistic work over the centuries, but also a greater exposure of women to risks in their emotional relationships, both in terms of health and economic dependence.
Through the self-portrait, the artist stages deformations and restlessness of the mind, in parallel to the famous novel 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde, in which the character hides a painting that takes for him the traces of old age and moral and ethical deviations. As the mirrors that we are, the compulsive use of the self-portrait in Fátima Spínola's work also speaks to us about the other, the one who is not present and who does not belong to us.
The main theme of this exhibition is the concept of "anxiety", a psychological presence since the dawn of humanity and that has been intensifying as our quality of life has improved. The fear of loss and the imposition of permanence is a motto for reflection, in a time when new challenges have arisen in a society that considered itself safe and evolved, but which found itself completely unprotected and isolated under the threat of a new virus and a new war on European territory.
Fátima Spínola was born in Satana (1984) and has an undergraduate and postgraduate degree in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon. She has been developing her artistic project in the areas of drawing, painting, installation and, more recently, video video-performance.
She has exhibited since 2000 in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Brazil, while being represented in the Imago Mundi collection of Luciano Benetton (Italy), in the collection Périplos - Arte Portugués de Hoy of the Contemporary Art Center of Malaga, (Spain) and in private collections in Switzerland, France, Scotland, Portugal and Brazil. Between 2012 and 2014 she participated in Madeira Island as an artist and co-manager of the "Artistic Collective Mad Space Invaders" and is, since 2012, co-manager of the project "Espaço 116”.
She also developed projects of curatorship and production of exhibitions and Urban Art between 2017 e 2022.
