Trindade Vieira

2007-03-02T09:24:00.000-08:00

2007-03-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

The possibilitys of real

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

2007-03-02T08:51:00.000-08:00

We are (all of us) a strange place

With this current exhibition, named “Reflexão do Lugar”, the plastic artist Trindade Vieira (born in Madeira), gives continuity to the reflection route where the thematic of the place crosses with its relation with the ontology of the substance. This thematic is an artistic approach that this same author have been privileging and that can be seen on other works, already presented, as for example, the exposition “Contemplação Topográfica” (Funchal 2004).
This time, the author analyses certain landscapes that are registered on his personal universe, using and transforming them in compositions that provides the spectator a certain entrance gate for a new space – a space that is more to reflection than to contemplation, demanding, this way the presence of an active and determined spectator.The works of this exposition interrupts us, like if they were asking about the complexity of the web that spins between the life and the places where it occurs. The question that Trindade Vieira seems to raise is, if we are not (all of us) a strange place. A place that is wonder at first, and wonder after?
Departing from the initial decomposition, from the deconstruction of the artist personal geography, the current exposition succeeds to put in evidence the structures that could be defined as elementary, but that most of the time, it escapes from us, when we look to our resigned reality laid in front of us and conditioned by time and geography.
By decomposing this reality on overlays, Trindade Vieira alerts us for a multiple dimension of our existence, helping us to exceed the physical or material reality, at the same time that sends us to the place of reflection of the Being.
Trindade Vieira invites us to go beyond (pure) Geography of the Space and establish what we would call Geography of the Existence. Instead of a drifted place, the author offers us an anchored place that stands on his own personal universe and appeals to the colours and to the invariances that can be found on it (banana trees, houses, fields, colours).
So, the works here presented are assumed as a bridge between the universal geography and the place of ontological interrogation, a place where each person asks about interior places – non representable – of each one of us. Besides, Trindade Vieira succeeds, on a sibylline way, on appealing to a (plastic) metonymic, that beyond identifying the author and his universe, seems to go on the direction of a dilemma, from which another knowledges – Philosophy and Biology – have been studying through the years, but on their own language of course. On other words, what seems to be in question is the following: is the place an expression from what we are, or it’s the place that defines our content (interior) and our expression (exterior).
The inquisitive look that Trindade Vieira has been privileging trough his artistic career comes strongly connected with this problematic. Expression and content are not always in the same place. Beyond the inquisitive metonymic already referred, what is revealed now to the public is, once more, a metaphor. At abandoning the structure of his personal geography, the author offers us a more complex vision – I would even say, more honest – of the life that goes through his interior. On Trindade Vieira works, the non-places succeed the real and physical places, giving through its course and on a sibylline form, a chance to an answer. If the geography defines tout cour, our existence, then the non-places correspond to the non-existences. Anyway, more than offering us his personal perspective, Trindade Vieira keeps focused on the dialectic, always difficult to define or to conceive, between the universe of the place and the universe of the existence. In a world like ours, that is on constant change, where the physical frontiers seem to be on a continuous dissolution, the works here reunited in “Reflexão do Lugar” are useful clues to the comprehension of our own contemporaneity.

Sérgio Benedito

Biografia

2005-09-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

Trindade Vieira
Borns in Madeira,Portugal, 1961.
Actually lives and works in Guimarães and Funchal, Portugal

1983-85 Art Students League, New York, USA.
1985 – 88 FIT – Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, USA
1988 Training Period in Gear, New York, USA.
Art Students League, New York, USA.

1993Avi Zucarman´s Photo Atelier, New York, USA

Workshop animation directly to film (painting) MOMA – Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA.
Art Students League, New York,USA.

Individuals (selection)

1985 Painting, Galeria da SRTC, Funchal.
1993 “Peixe Espada Preto”, installation and black and white photo, Galeria da Zona Velha, Funchal.
“Memórias”, painting and black and white photo, Universidade do Minho, Guimarães.
“Dimensão”, audiovisual installation (slides), Baccara Casino da Madeira, Funchal.
“De(composições)”, photos without camera, Casino da Madeira, Funchal.
1996 Installation (launching of the artistic fanzine UMBIGO nº 0), Fora d’oras, Funchal
1998 “Forças da Natureza”, painting, Paço Duques de Bragança, Guimarães.
2000 “ A Magna Relação com a matéria", painting installation, Galeria de Arte Inquisição, Funchal.
2001 “Matéria e Sedução” painting, Casa da Luz – Museu de Electricidade, Funchal.
“A Memória Estética da Matéria”, painting installation, Museu de Arte Primitiva Moderna, Guimarães.
2002 “Matéria, Lugar de Inquietude”, painting/sculpture installation, Galeria de Arte Mouraria, Funchal.
2004 “Contemplação Topográfica”, painting/sculpture installation, Galeria de Arte Mouraria, Funchal
“Bocados de Céu e de Terra”, painting installation, Madeira International Airport.
2005 “Reflexão do Lugar”, Galeria Sms – Guimarães
“Bocados de Céu e de Terra” (reposition), painting installation, Casa da Luz, Museu de Electricidade, Funchal
“Sex Appeal”, Painting/Drawing installation – Look, Funchal
2006 “Entre uma Visão e um Sentimento”, Painting in Tills/mixed Technique, SRTC Gallery, Funchal.

Collectives (selection)

1984 “One Day Show”, painting, Central Park, New York, USA.
1985 Painting, Art Students League, New York, USA
1986 Drawing, Jacobs Javi Center, New York, USA
1987 Painting, Art Students League, New York, USA
1989 “EuroArte”, painting, Guimarães
1993 Painting, Art Students League, New York, USA
1997 “Marcha Gualteriana 97” Photo installation, “Convento das Domenicas”, Guimarães
1998 “Colectiva de Verão”, Galeria de Arte Inquisição, Funchal.
“30 Artistas da Madeira” Castelo de São Filipe, Setúbal.
“I Salão de Outono” - Artes Plásticas da Madeira” – Galeria de Arte Inquisição, Funchal
1999 “Colectiva de Grande Formato” – Galeria de Arte Inquisição, Funchal
“Imersão Parcial”, Paço Duques de Bragança, Guimarães
“II Salão de Outono” Galeria de Arte Inquisição, Funchal
2000 Painting and Sculpture Installation, Galeria de Arte Inquisição, Funchal”.
Painting Installation “MarcaMadeira”
Galeria de Arte Inquisição, Madeira Tecnopolo, Funchal
Installation (launching of the artistic fanzine UMBIGO nº 1), Casa de Cultura de Santa Cruz
2001 “Colectiva Inaugural” Painting, Galeria de Arte Mouraria, Funchal.
“Colectiva 9 Artistas”, Installation, Galeria de Arte Mouraria, Funchal
2002 “Colectiva 1º aniversário”, Painting, Galeria de Arte Mouraria, Funchal
2003 “Colectiva 2º aniversário” Painting, Galeria de Arte Mouraria, Funchal
“ Grande Colectiva de Natal” Installation, Galeria de Arte Mouraria, Funchal
2004 Collective “ Uma Obvra Um Livro”, Painting, Casa da Luz, Museu de Electricidade, Funchal
“Colectiva 3º aniversário” Painting, Galeria de Arte Mouraria, Funchal
Colectiva “Gerações”, Painting, Galeria de Arte Mouraria, Funchal
2005 “Voar com imaginação”, Painting, Museu de Electricidade, Funchal

Represented in several public and private collections in countries such as Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, England, Germany, Norway, USA, Japan between others.