The exhibition ORANGE COUNTY BALLAD, a project integrated into the [PeP] gallery's laboratory space, brings together drawings and visual poems by Catarina Patrício. In the relationship between the two groups of works, we find the old but always complex (another way of saying dynamic and rich) relationship between image and word, in the equally old quest to create new sequences of language. Can images and words illuminate each other?
An analyst of the visual forms of the world, with a particular penchant for revealing them through cinema, Catarina Patrício approaches drawing in an eminently technical way, without, however, evading the emotional, narrative aspects to which the choice of frames and the new montages (superimpositions, inventions, intersections of images and words) invite us.
History and culture, two sides of the same coin, have produced not only tangible, everyday realities, but also vast symbolic, narrative meanings that are always the result of complex processes. To put it another way, nothing we live or think is devoid of what we might call the air of time, mixed with our personal circumstances, tensions and desires. We live within relationships, in concrete and physical spaces and times, but also conceptually, with ideas, dreams, hopes and beliefs. The old definition of the human as the animal that signifies, the cultural animal, is notorious in Catarina Patrício's work. Images and words ‐ nothing escapes history and culture. And this is what the artist expresses, in a surgical analysis, pencil in hand, in a version of a benign scalpel.
There is a relationship of dance, of tension, between images and words. The former, permeable to the latter, allow themselves to be redefined or "resized" by them; and the latter ‐ the words ‐ cannot get rid of their design past, of a certain "arch‐scripture", which points to
this past scratched into the earth, and which has changed, sedimented, over time, without, however, getting rid of this body ‐ the sign.
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CATARINA PATRÍCIO
Has a PhD in Communication from NOVA‐FCSH, with specialisation in Contemporary Culture and New Technologies, completed post‐doctoral studies at the same faculty. With a degree in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon and a Master's in Anthropology from NOVA‐FCSH, Catarina Patrício has been a lecturer in the Department of Communication Sciences and the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at ECATI [School of Communication, Architecture, Arts and Information Technologies], Lusófona University, since 2010. A researcher at CICANT, she regularly publishes essays and exhibits her work.
