The artist Tomás Cunha Ferreira, in conversation with curator Ana Anacleto

24 de Junho 2024 às 18h30 nos estúdios da RAMA.

Tomás Cunha Ferreira Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

Tomás Cunha Ferreira lives and works in Lisbon. His work combines various media, in an open-circuit practice, which function as prototypes that can take on various phases and states - scores, notations, visual poems, paintings, objects, etc. Each work results in a condensed hybrid figure, whose reading is in constant transition between visual elements and rhythmic or sound elements. In his 1965 text ‘Between Poetry and Painting’, Benedictine monk and poet Dom Sylvester Houédard uses the terms ‘logos’ and ‘icon’ as broader signifiers of the word and painting. Going through a historical chronology of the relationship between logos and icon, from primitive artefacts to the pamphlets of the 1960s, Dom Sylvester Houédard proposes terms such as ‘quasi-painting’, ‘quasi-word’, or even ‘quasi-letter’, understood as open programmatic hooks in constant redefinition.

The aim of these composite terms is programmatic and their premises seek to undermine the existence of the word and painting as separate subjects, giving way to zones of free circulation and non-separation between text and image, between poetry and painting, between logos and icon. Like siblings separated at birth, logos and icon are rescued through this skewed family tree drawn up by Houédard. 

Recent solo and group exhibitions:

Galho da Goiabeira, Alfaia, Loulé (2024); Mistifório, Culturgest, Porto (2023); Pequenos Fogos, com José Leonilson, Brotéria, Lisboa (2022); Footnote 15: Um Protótipo, Galeria Boavista, Lisboa (2022); Desdesenho, Gabinete de Desenho do Museu da Cidade, Porto (2021); Panapanã, Galeria Athena, Rio de Janeiro (2019); As Is, Galeria Emmanuel Barbault, Nova Iorque (2019); Group Performance na The Emily Harvey Foundation (com Weronika Trojanska, Jeff Perkins, Diego Leclery, David Zuckerman), Nova Iorque (2019).