The galleries Millan and Almeida & Dale present, in partnership, Rodrigo Andrade: Pintura Paisagem. Curated by Lorenzo Mammì, the exhibitions take place in both galleries, bringing together a survey of the last 20 years of the artist’s landscape paintings.
While the selection on view at Almeida & Dale gathers, for the first time, paintings produced from 2001 to the present day, only new works are shown at Millan. The selection demonstrates the variation of styles and methods adopted by the artist, highlighting two sets of works: paintings made in the studio and outdoors, the latter exhibited for the first time. The exhibitions mark the publication of a book with the same title, with original essays by curator Lorenzo Mammì and Portuguese art critic Delfim Sardo, as well as a chronology by Marina Frúgoli.
According to the curator, “Rodrigo Andrade’s landscape painting is, on the one hand, a reflection on the history of painting, from one of the genres most sensitive to changes in techniques and styles. On the other hand, it is the rescue of a direct relationship with the world around him, testing the conventions of painting in the experience and perception of space. Codes of representation and experience of reality are not disjointed, but constantly refer to each other.
The multiplicity of techniques and procedures operated by Andrade stands out in the group of works on display: the landscapes are created from observation or from a repertoire of images that includes photographs; video game scenarios and works by historical painters. According to Sardo: “In all of these forms, appropriations of typologies of images transformed into layers of oleaginous and physical skin, a remission echoes out for forms from which the world may be seen, from which it may be revisited with an availability towards its representation and, therefore, its reconfiguration.”