Camino de Santos

Neilson Leirner and Albuquerque Mendes

Exhibition

Nelson Leirner (São Paulo, 1932) and Albuquerque Mendes (Trancoso, Portugal, 1953) are two artists who illuminate our experience. In their artwork they travel and journey along paths of feelings and meanings, setting out from different origins and approaches but finally coming together in a meeting. A visual and poetic meeting that also allows us, the others who are present, to recognize ourselves in it. Paths flowing together as a demonstration of the circularity of the world. In this show they jointly present a single work, Camino de santos (Road of Saints), which might also be called “The One in the Other”. It is the outcome of a dialogue between two artists who consider themselves brothers on the creative plane, despite the very different work they produce and the fact that they live in two different continents, Europe and America. What Camino de santos proposes is a kind of visual tapestry woven by four hands, containing a series of “intersecting stories” (Albuquerque Mendes). The linking theme of this cross-cultivation of stories is the idea of the parade, the demonstration or the procession, which in turn establishes an interplay of contrasts between the sacred and the profane. Both Leirner and Mendes question the meaning and impact of rituals and ceremonies, even turning them inside out and showing the side of them that we do not normally see.