And a feeling always
sudden
by the flaps of wings achieved
in screeches of blue
the infinity
For the second time this year, the plastic artist Trindade Vieira brings to public a new exhibition of unknown works that carries a continuation to the intense creativity he has been showing through all the years that completes his artistic career. The painting and sculpture “Bocados de Ceú e de Terra” can be understood like a subtle poetic exercise around the different narratives made around the world of travel. Conceived specifically for just one purpose – the celebrations of the Madeira International Airport anniversary – this exhibition brings a new era to the definitive deviationism of the language, signs and from the generating element that gave to this artist, his plastic creativity: the banana tree, the plant from which much of the production of this artist leaned so far.
Hence, “Bocados de Céu e de Terra” pretends to introduce another creative side of Trindade Vieira: first of all, because of specificity of the thematic, secondly, regarding the circumstances of the exhibition concept.
The route of a traveller is simple, it is completed between the starting point and the end, however, how many feelings, sometimes conflicting, come to pass and let us think once more what a privileged we are granted to fly. The awareness, formed from the several earth views that we have when we are on an airplane on the sky, is resized too many times to our little human dimension and to our impossibility of embracing the reality on its vast and grand expression. It comes to our mind the nostalgia of what is left behind or, on alternative, the happiness of meeting again a space that is familiar and well-known to us. It is precisely this context that the artist appeals, in order to create the images shown on this exhibition. However, adding an image to another is not the unique and definitive way to produce a feeling, it can consist on tearing apart a breach in the visible world and opening it to its multiple meanings and living paths, celebrating the imponderable of its feelings. It’s on this premises that lives a good pedagogy to deal with the heterocosmic principle of the images of our days. The principle can be resumed on a simple idea: an image can be either an open window to the world or a transparent layer that is opposed to the most immediate certainties. Saying by other words, it is always what is right next to us – and on this case, the insular space – that demands more work to our eyes. Maybe this is the biggest specificity of the work of Trindade Vieira: transform the space, the quotidian and the unusual, elevating them to the status of work of art, resizing their importance, and subsequently, the way of looking.
The present exhibition will not be an exception to all of this: being the islanders used to the need of travelling, we can observe how the artist transforms, on a symbiotic operation, what he sees from an airplane window with his own imaginary and memorial, associating all to the plastic dimension of the artistic creation. Thus, the artist proposes a set of works that lays on the air views seen from the traveller’s point of view, as well as the idea of the centre – from the platform that receives and departs the airplanes – representing the visual register of the airplane transit on the immense blue sky. If, on one hand, the elements that characterize the painting of this artist are abandoned, on the other hand, it is kept the reference to the island as a background to the established narrative. The technique used, also presents the artist continuation on an evolutionary route of discoveries, having here the latent and hedonic principle of the game.
As a complement to this exhibit, the artist includes a set of works extra-exposition that presents continuity and proportionates another possibility of revisiting his work.
Now, stands the time to wait that this images achieve a euphonious dimension of a low level flight trough the slopes and hillsides of the island, and heads towards the vast and ethereal blue reflected on the immensity of the liquid plain that separates the continents, finding on those who observe them, at arrival or at departure, a shelter full of contemplation and acknowledgment.
Sérgio Benedito
