encontro inesperado

Galeria Graça Brandão, Lisboa, 2024. Curated by Manuel Santos Maia

(…) Diogo Nogueira, clear heir to Gauguin and Matisse, initiates a gesture of reconciliation between a fruitful care for colors, attending to the codes that, in a more or less conscious way, they evoke in the viewer, and the attention to form, whose primitivism or synthetism – a technique founded by Gauguin – are distorted in favor of a movement, which is indeed of the fauvist type. In this sense, the spirited colors faint for the uprising of a passionate tone in the paintings. The significance and aesthetic fervor provoked by these paintings derive from an underground sphere of meaning, a past more or less present, from which one can extract a last form of life, as if after the outbreak of civilization, of which human language was finally universal, founded on a widespread amnesia: the return to the body, to gesture, as a means of fundamental communication. Just as in the cave paintings, in the caves of Chauvet and Lascaux, but in a symbolic reversal, no longer dealing with the dawn of the world, but with the dream that is still possible to dream after the end. A return to the natural, but a natural that does not resist yielding to certain human codes, due to the reminiscences that still propitiate them.

The virtuosity was achieved by the man who trained his hand, and there is no way to return to nature except by building large panels as totemic as they are choreographic, as well as political. Thus, just as the gestures depicted in Nogueira’s works are simple and refer to activities that men have practiced since the beginning of time, there is an intention – stemming, perhaps, from a deep pleasure in playing with iconographies – to update certain codes, to make them current, to inhabit this time. (…)

— Maria Brás Ferreira

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