os horizontes do reverso do mundo

Espaço Mira, Porto, 2023. Curadoria de Manuel Santos Maia

Diogo Nogueira and Raul Macedo present Os Horizontes do reverso do Mundo, in an exhibition that divides space while expanding it.

These two young artists have explored multiple media, including painting, ceramics, video and photography, probably in an almost generational pulse: to say that very young artists bring with them a great desire for experimentation.

There is something in common between the two, given that they are interested in investigating the field of the private, the insertion of personal life into artistic production, from a point of view in which this personal field can be confused with a fictional side or a self-mythology – to use Diogo Nogueira’s words – and vice versa. If, on the one hand, Nogueira paints large-scale panels in which he refers to themes that he himself calls the classic themes of painting, such as hunting, Henri Matisse’s dance, bathing and bacchanalia, on the other hand, Macedo’s video is more direct. It intimidates us because of the size of the bodies and the realism of those bodies. The pieces presented by Raul Macedo, both remind us of the rawness of Nan Goldin’s images, in a self-representation of her time, and take us back to Wolfgang Tillmans, in his series dedicated to the bohemian nightlife, its spoils, the memories of the bodies that were there, and the objects that reflect that experience.

— Joana Mendonça

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