Artists' studios can provide excellent insights into artists’ working methods. The studio of artist Mariana Gomes (Faro, 1983) is open and airy, but thanks to the lighting and the placement of tables and shelving units, other spaces emerge there, areas where her different activities are carried out. A visual interplay is at work, designed by chance I imagine, where some objects immediately stand out. A series of small sculptures, for instance, which includes busts of Antonin Artaud, Philip Guston, Tintoretto, Leopardi, Borges, Eliot and Henri Michaux, strike one as being homages to her influences, but also as reflecting a central aspect of her work, namely a need to touch the material, to feel it.

Accordingly, Mariana Gomes champions painting as an untiring, passionate, quest featuring play, transgression, happenings, festive and carnivalesque elements, masks, passion and humor, and endeavoring to walk on the cutting edge, to forge new paths. Painting as action, a feast on the canvas. And drawing as a nonstop flow, a succession of images evocative of thin skins, fine layers, but also of murals.

Often, in her paintings, she begins with allusions, but ultimately consigns more importance to gesture, to the language of abstraction, to the cracks and furrows. Viewing her oeuvre as a whole, one notices a kind of determination to always begin anew (Icarus, time), as when she painted over already-exhibited canvases, not out of a desire to cover them, but rather to provoke an encounter between two moments, two actions, two quests, with the utter conviction that they were one and the same thing —the act of painting— which could be enacted on top of another presence, even on a blank canvas. Not to mention her playing with shadows, or projecting images onto masks and objects, determined to know what lies behind or within the painting.

(Text by Miguel Fernández-Cid and Pilar Souto Soto, curators of the exhibition)