Madragoa, Lisboa
For their first participation in ART-O-RAMA, Lisboa-based gallery Madragoa will present a duo show with new productions by Sara Chang Yan and Renato Leotta.
The curatorial project, specifically produced for the occasion, aims to create a conversation with both artists whose contrasted practices — one embedded with an abstract and extremely sensorial creation process, the other rooted in an observation of the real — come close in the two specific series of works proposed for the booth for their strong relationship with sound.
Displayed along the walls of the booth, with specific supports that are perpendicular to the surface of the wall, the series “sequence / time quality i“ by Sara Chang Yan consists of number of drawings in which the artist intervened both with graphite, colour and a physical modification of the paper support, through cuts, holes and the removal of thin layers of material. The abstract, gestural interventions are often inspired to the artist by music and sound in general, seen as an avoidable part of the human experience. The succession of drawings reads as a personnal musical staff. The drawings are the visual result of the utopical act of rendering visible something impossible to reduce to a single form.
Creating a path along the main wall and towards the short one in the booth, the series of terracotta sculptures titled Aventura by Renato Leotta condensates a visual and sensorial experience of the sea in a group of objects that are immediately perceived as containers. First of all, each one of the scupltures shows on its top the shape of the beach dunes that are obtained from the casts of portions of shore, made when the sea withdraws during the low tides: they reproduce the delicate, ephemeral forms of the sand and at the same time express a plastic strength due to a sculptural adherence to the physical surface of the landscape. For Un fatto completo (madragoa), the artist drew on a sand in of a Portuguese beach the plan of the exhibition space of Madragoa, with a gesture that is in deep conversation with “mental maps” by Sara Chang Yan but at the same time rooted in a re-discovery of the real, in this case through the analysis of the relationship between architecture and landscape.