Crying Eye Laughing Eye

"A pressing painting of intention and speed"

Fernando Lanhas, in Matéria Prima - painting, drawings, objects – 2004

Agostinho Santos' way of being is the echo of a journalistic practice and its plastic derivation diluted in the vertigo of time. Attention, observation and conviviality, closely linked to an author who empathizes with the social problems of everyday life, include bold paintings on rolls of industrial paper, referring to the provocative messages of urban murals. This exhibition brings together mostly smaller works from one of his themes: social intervention. In his use of spontaneous, almost childish lines and pamphlet-like writing, in his drawings and paintings, his activist inclinations stand out.

The gazes, our own and those of others, the paradigmatic abstract gaze, without a determined owner, that turns kaleidoscopically at different speeds, an animal gaze, ageless, as a sign of complicity or demarcation, mark the rhythm of events. As Agostinho Santos' entire creative process is characterized by symbolic appropriation and hybridisation, the works presented here, although of different times (1994 to 2024), are the result of the continuous exchange between memory, observation and thought, and the relationship between reality and the author's imagination. The strength of their immediate expressiveness and productive capacity conveys a permanent restlessness and a critical view of society.