"Ephemeral Landscapes" presents a set of screenprints, paintings and drawings by Engrácia Cardoso (b. 1976), painter, engraver and award-winning artist, in dialogue with the audiovisual and musical project "Efémera" by musician and composer Rui Gaio (b. 1975).

Two new screenprints by the artist will be presented and launched for the first time as part of her current project linked to "landscape and the construction of a path" and which are based on an emigration experience in Trás-os-Montes, north of Portugal, in 1969, which involved a group of two women and several children. This group migrated clandestinely following a footpath, between rocks and wild vegetation, towards France, which Engrácia Cardoso traveled between Portugal and Spain, in a process that the artist herself describes:

“The construction of the path led to the realization of a continuity project that connected me to the journey, to its particular nuances and to the landscape. (...) “In front of a sovereign nature, the landscape presents itself in a pictorial and photographic space. Creation has its expressive place, emphasizing an interior and intimate aspect as well as an external aspect in relation with escaping. (...) everything appears without order, warning, or figure. Landscapes can be seen fragmenting the shapes into drawings. Departing from loose elements of nature, scratching, drawing, photographing, immersing ourselves in the chaos of experience and imagination. After a long escape, the path to arrival was revealed to us, giving shape and visibility to this project. It is not so much about a revelation, but about building intimacy in the desire to open-up and transcend ourselves in a silent dialogue.”

Rui Gaio, in turn, presents us with an audio-visual installation with projection of images accompanied by proofs of the “efémera” album-book, created in serigraphy by Filipa Oliveira and João Flecha (Sud Sud) with the artistic direction of Catarina Machado.

This audio-visual and musical project focuses on the day-to-day life of people, places and “non-places”, in the author’s perspective, according to which “in a frenetic creative odyssey, the everyday experience is converted into musical pieces, combined with moving images and immediately published.” Based on piano and synthesizers, these pieces, called everydays, “swell up to complete the utopian goal of reaching the number 365”, in a poetic record that brings together the lived and the imagined.

The artist thus intends to capture the ephemerality of the experience, bringing together the plastic aspect of the moving photographic image in his videos and the musical background. 

Opening and Launch of new screenprints: July 7, 5 pm

ENGRÁCIA CARDOSO, RUI GAIO
Ephemeral Landscapes

CPS Gallery at CCB - Centro Cultural de Belém
Praça do Império, Lisbon
Everyday from 10 am to 7 pm 
Until July 13th. Free entrance,

From the Real to the Imaginary. Engrácia Cardoso and Rui Gaio in Dialogue - Text by Maria João Fernandes

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