PORTUGUESE SURREALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY

Posted by: Santiago Ribeiro

Surrealist artists Santiago Ribeiro, from Coimbra and Paula Rosa, from Lisbon, will organize an exhibition entitled “Portuguese Surrealism in the 21st Century”, at Moinho das Lapas Museum, in Cernache, Coimbra, Portugal.
Santiago Ribeiro will present traditional paintings, oil on canvas, while Paula Rosa will present digital mixed media artworks. This exhibition offers to the public the possibility to see around 15 artworks that will enrich the space of the museum, under the direction of Marco Cruz.

The exhibition will open on Saturday 8th December and continue to January 8th and can be visited, Monday to Friday, from 2pm to 7pm.

“Portuguese Surrealism in the 21st Century” is a project that aims to celebrate the Surrealism’s transversality understood as awareness in the face of civilization and culture, rejecting conventionalities and diving into the realm of absolute freedom of expression. Far from feeding sterile polemics and meta- perceptive languages, the project exalts the revolutionary and avant-garde aspects of the surrealist imagery, focused on the insight, the discovery, the internal development of the artist and in the importance of the metaphor, symbol and analogy.

As an art movement, Surrealism has its chronological origin perfectly defined in the history of art, in the context of the 20’s of the last century, a period of strong social and political uncertainty, an aspect which has been recurrent in the history of our civilization. Prevailing cultural beliefs in Europe, as well as human vulnerability, were being questioned facing a reality more and more difficult to understand and to accept. Surrealism sought to overcome the conventional and traditional perception of reality, developing an aesthetics based on the value of the Freudian findings about the Unconscious as a complement to the conscious life and the dream’s ability to communicate. It appears, therefore, as awareness, opposing to the conventions with freedom itself, replacing positivism by dreams, the unbelievable, the unusual, because it was felt that man overcomes the limitations of matter in the pursuit of abstract.