Galeria Filomena Soares proudly presents the exhibition STAIRS of ARTUR ROSA (Lisbon, 1926). The exhibition opens on December 4th and will be on view until the 7th of March 2015.
"Stairs", Artur Rosa
The works presented in this exhibition are mostly from the '70s, the decade of most intense artistic activity of Artur Rosa. The exhibition also presents, for the first time, the sculpture "Stairs", a work from 1984 that summarizes many of the artistic questions from which the artist´s body of works have evolved from, thus denying, in a way, the apparent interruption of his artistic work after the '70s. The truth is that, as with any others, their origins are a bridge to later works, even if presented in different formats and molds, as it is in the case of architecture, a field in which Arthur Rosa still draws his desire for sculpture and installations; his desire to play with perspective and its possibilities within the human scale.
Despite of the influences of specific movements of art history in the work of Artur Rosa, it would be extremely narrow to focus the interpretation of his work only through the inheritance of Op Art, Minimalism, or to associate it merely with a language that only arises out of these and other artistic movements.
With a work that points towards the minimalism and the potential of the geometry, lines and colors come together to exist as a movement before our gaze. The works here exhibited and projected gain their presence through the look of those who observe them -- a spectator who, besides being sensitive to the changes that art brings to him, is also a citizen, possessing, therefore, a look that permanently questions the space where he inhabits; or a spectator who, in addition to the abstraction of the artwork, asks himself how the lines and the colors of a specific place enhance his living among other beings and physical objects.
In the first exhibitions of his work, Artur Rosa already sought an equivalence between the space of the studio and a gallery, as well as the urban space: place of social interaction, of human experience, as well as several geometric possibilities within the different paths that a city conveys.
The understanding of Arthur Rosa´s work can be suggested by that same way: a work that, not far from that which drawing brings in his original state, plays with the lines that come out of a piece of paper, its shapes, and colors. A work that also plays with perspective, calling to itself the viewer (a look deconstructed by the author's Self-portrait); creating sculptures to the full scale of a city, as in Sculpture to Urban Space I and II, thus generating a space of movement and, mostly, of human experience - the same space where, nowadays, the architecture of the artist lives, thus evoking the perpetuation of his original thought.
Francisco Valente, 2014