Exhibition

Xana’s exhibition “Rua Projectada à Rua do Ouvidor” on display at Casa-Atelier Vieira da Silva

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The exhibition Rua Projectada à Rua do Ouvidor by artist Xana (Alexandre Barata) is open to the public until April 14th at the Casa-Atelier Vieira da Silva in Lisbon.

Xana chose the canvas “Rua do Ouvidor”, painted by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva in 1942, to create a series of new works in acrylic paint on canvas and paper, which he presents in the space of Atelier Vieira da Silva. This reference work vividly portrays the bustling human activity that Vieira and Arpad experienced in Brazil during the 1940s, on the important commercial artery of Rio de Janeiro.

In the paintings now created by Xana, there is an appropriation and free and expanded recreation of the patterns that mark the clothing of the characters in Vieira da Silva’s painting. While, for the artist, those standardized forms are already the main subject of the “street”, where human figures are only vaguely suggested, for Xana, the only protagonists are abstract forms, luminous colors, and ornamental rhythms, now reinvented in various paintings. From the legacy of the painter of “cobalt blue dresses for happiness” or “vermilion for blood to circulate freely,” as Vieira stated in a testamentary text, Xana continues that path, reinventing it in a Rua Projectada à Rua do Ouvidor, adding new forms to “fly higher” with all colors and assert his freedom.

The exhibition Rua Projectada à Rua do Ouvidor can be visited until April 14, 2024, from Tuesday to Sunday, between 10 am and 6 pm, at Alto de S. Francisco nº1, Lisbon (Jardim das Amoreiras). Admission is free and must be requested at the reception of the Museum at Praça das Amoreiras nº 56, Lisbon.

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About the artist:

Xana was born in Lisbon in 1959.

He graduated in Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon in 1984. Currently living and working in Lisbon, Lagos, and Faro, he co-authored the Visual Arts degree project at the University of Algarve, where he has been teaching since 2005. In 2019, he earned a Ph.D. in Communication Culture and Arts from the University of Algarve with the project “Love, Freedom, and Wisdom – Dialectics of Visual Construction”. As a visual artist, he has held various exhibitions, scenographies, or interventions in public spaces since 1981. In 2005, Culturgest in Lisbon presented an anthological selection of his works titled “Opaque Art and Other Ghosts”.

In recent years, his artistic work has focused on creating temporary installations/constructions for public art. Notably, he constructed the “Arco do Triunfo” on Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona in 2009. In 2010, he presented the installation “Assembleia” in the gardens of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, part of the exhibition “Res Publica”. In 2012, he created the installation “Nova Assembleia e algumas próteses” at the Museum of Chiado. In the spring of 2012, he built the sculptural intervention “Uma Casa no Céu” in the Almourol Contemporary Sculpture Park, Vila Nova da Barquinha. He completed the installation “Amor Libera Lux” as part of the “Vicente’ 2013” initiative in Belém, Lisbon. In 2016, he carried out public space interventions in the Algarve as part of the project “Watt?” (organized by LAC and EDP Foundation). He initiated a series of labyrinth-themed constructions with “Labirinto X001” (2017) at Teatro da Politécnica/Artistas Unidos in Lisbon and realized “Labirinto X002” (2019) at Associação 289 in Faro.

Xana is featured in several museums and public collections, including the Serralves Museum in Porto, Kunstlerhaus-Musonturm in Frankfurt, the Luso-American Foundation, and the Center for Modern Art at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.

For more information, visit www.xana.tv.