Galeria Quadrado Azul, in Porto, opens a solo exhibition by Isabel Ribeiro on March 8, 4 pm. A series of recent works in painting are focused on two topics that have been approached by the artist: the city and the absence.
The term fracciente was freely created by the artist from the collage of the words ‘failure’ and ‘conscious’. This idea runs through the oil paintings and the mural that reveal interior and exterior details of the contemporary city: details which are empty, desolate and without inhabitant.
Isabel Ribeiro born in 1976, in Covilhã, Portugal. Lives and works between Porto and Lisbon. Painting, drawing, sculpture and video are the media used by the artist to represent situations and spaces. For the construction of images she appropriates references from the western literary imaginary or from everyday signage.
Starting exhibiting in 2001, she is interested in the diversity of anxieties generated in modernity that have to do with a failure of the individual with his environment: the individual and the collective crisis, the conflict between the individual and the social, transformations of space, forces of change, the constant failure of the movements that advocate change, the loneliness of the fight, dilemmas and the longevity of the community, depression and tedium.
A usual procedure in many of her paintings is the production of slightly changes, displacements, new frameworks, the substitution or deletion of elements from the image of reference. They are images indicating places to escape, places that talk about failure. Other works, auto-biographical, are distorted only by the contingency of the technique.
The artist’s name is also connected to the foundation of Salão Olímpico and Projecto Apêndice, two of the spaces that arouse in Porto, in the last years, managed by the artists themselves.
Most recent exhibitions include, in 2013: the solo intervention in the group project Casa Ocupada, at Casa da Cerca, Almada, Portugal, ant the participation in the group exhibitions: PROYECTOR, Espaço Malmo, Madrid, Spain; War(m) Up, Casa Bernardo, Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. In 2012: Au delà des mots, Résidence André de Gouveia, Paris, France; Para além das palavras, Espaço Campanhã, Porto, Portugal; shapes and forces, Galeria Quadrado Azul, Porto, Portugal; Aproximações à profundidade, Sala do Veado, Lisbon, Portugal; Cinco Séculos de Desenho na Colecção da FBAUP, Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis, Porto, Portugal.
