NUNO VIEGAS | “Cosmogonia a Alastrar no Canto da Sala”
OPEN | May 12 – June 25, 2022
SCHEDULE | Thu-Sun, 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm
LIVE PAINTING | 12-13-14-15 May, 16:00-20:00
GUIDED TOUR | 15 May, 18:00
SUPPORT | República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes
ENTRY | Free
“I spread out the toys and search, without foreshadowing or inciting too much the purpose, I return to that time when the world was reduced to a prolix box of pieces and the permanent reconstitution of the meaning in them, the imagination has always taught the way, starting with the ingenuity of the steps and the coordination of the body, that the legs and arms and hands do nothing more than serve their purposes of extrapolation of what reality ended up with among finite humans, their tiny quarrels, misfortunes and ambitions.
From the corners and right angles where life is underestimated, like unforeseen humidity slowly corroding the architectural fiction of eternity, I put one foot after the other, in that cosmogonic impulse that antagonizes the void meticulously and feverishly, without promising exits, entrances perhaps, guessing hatches to peek beyond the mists, holes in the ubiquitous blanket that hardens the view and blurs the discernment, to be the acting principle that observes the act, the first spectator and interpreter, an ignitor and receptacle of that furious explosion that has been spreading the cosmos, it is said. It seems that a dot is the beginning and I avoid the end dot.” (Nuno Viegas, March 2022)
BIO: NUNO VIEGAS was born in Almeida in 1977. He studied Fine Arts – Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. From 2001 to 2015 he held individual exhibitions annually at Galeria Arte Periférica in Lisbon. In the same period and until the present, he participated in several collective exhibitions in Portugal and abroad. In 2005 he illustrated issues 166,167 and 168 of the Colóquio Letras Magazine of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. From 2013 to 2015, he lived and worked in Berlin in an atelier integrated in BBK (Berufsverband Bildender Künstler Berlin). Since 2016, he has lived and worked in Castanheira, where, with the support of the company Toino Abel, he has restored part of the ruins of an old nightclub, transforming the space into the studio where he lived for two years, a project with a view to hosting a future program of artistic residencies. Also in that year, he joined the Juncateatro-Teatro Regional do Juncal as a set designer, costume designer and actor and has occasionally collaborated with Leirena, Leiria Theater Company.
He was Art Director on a German-produced documentary/animated film “Extreme Value-E.J. Gumbel, the professor from Heidelberg”. In recent years, he has made public his facet of sound exploration, in real-time compositions, which he likes to call sound tracks for the written word or improvisations to induce spontaneous verbalization.
His work is mostly figurative, with recent incursions into abstraction, focusing on the material side of drawing / painting, trying to give a procedural testimony, valuing improvisation and attention to accidents, in an involvement that is also narrative from a point of view committed to the absurd.
He is represented in several private collections in Portugal and abroad, at Graphotek in Berlin, at Fundação PLMJ- Sociedade de Advogados and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Elvas.