PROGRAMA 3
colective show at Irmã Feia Gallery, Almada, 2022
About painting on the street - taking the mural into the gallery:
Painting on the street means leaving a part of us, being exposed. It is a process of surrender and selflessness. The work enclosed in a gallery is a portrait, a ´crop´, a selection protected and prepared for the showcase, hiding time and the process. The work on the street is in itself a transparency, a vulnerability. The day on the street opens doors to the exhibition; the exhibition, not of the canvas in a rectangle, but of the artist as a whole.
Exposed to the elements, exposed to looks, exposed to the environment and permeable to what comes from it. Anyone who paints on the street is exposed because everything that is theirs is there. There are your things, your materials, your work tools. Your project is there, your process is visible; organize materials, transfer projects to the wall. Open, move, mix colors, decide and mark spaces. Giving the first colors and even the last brushstroke, all of this is visible to those who pass by, to the judgment of those who share the street with the artist.
When the process seems finished, the artist never leaves the wall, that place. Painting on the street is leaving part of ourselves. Leaving on the last day is forcing detachment, there is a force in two directions; leaving part of us on the street knowing that now nothing is ours. It's giving, offering a gift to everyone present from then on. Subjecting ourselves to the vulnerability of the work on the street is the artist's ultimate step of selflessness and exposure. But it is also this, this tension and this dedication of heart, that magnetizes the public space around the work.
Being exposed on the street in this way is accepting that, as an artist, we will always be dissected, broken into parts, stripped naked. Everything about us is on display in the street. How we think, what techniques we use, our work process. When we get angry with the wall and when we are alone with it. A voyeurism.
A car without windows, without inside or outside. A skeleton building. An x-ray. A small open animal or an open toy separated into parts. Disassembled.
Program 3 intends to think about this as a contrast with the closed object traditionally found in galleries. Having said that, more than showing the result, it aims to be a thought about the process of exposure and vulnerability of the artist and the work and, therefore, placing the “work happening” as material. From the inauguration to the last day, the work will be under construction. The public is invited to come as often as they want, to see everything from us, because the artist on the street is never separated from the work.
The windows are open so that the process is never hiden. Working hours are at the mercy of artists’ lives. And, finally, painting again in white as a symbol of vulnerability, ephemerality, and exposure to which the artist is subject.
