André Ruivo

Haunted - Exhibition of drawings from 2003

11 May to 23 May 2021

On the eve of the opening of Tinta nos Nervos, the painter Pedro Proença, who was taking part in the space's inaugural exhibition, appeared with a large canvas wrapped under his arm. It was a work by André Ruivo, a draughtsman, illustrator and animation film director, who in the early 2000s shared a studio with him and a series of other creators, including João Fazenda and Joana Toste. When he left the space, the artist had left behind a canvas, an unclaimed spoil, so that the other artists could use the frame by repainting the image. Unpacked and stored by Proença, it arrived at Tinta fifteen years later and was immediately adopted as the project's calling card. The reason for this was that it was totally in tune with the concept on which Tinta was built: the space of the drawn image and its multiple unfoldings, narrative suggestion, creative process on paper (or canvas), realisation, challenge, experimentation, non-conformity.

Since then, we have harboured the desire to bring together work done by the artist at the time he produced this image, a year which was particularly fruitful and the creative impulse materialised in different areas, from drawing to painting, illustration to music.

Under the term Haunted, found in the temporal distance of the reflection on what was produced, around twenty drawings at different scales are now brought together.

Often the same drawing appears in them, as if the author was gradually conquering the size of the support, the demands of composition, the handling of scratching materials and rehearsing the impact of the images. This is the case with the drawing that gave rise to the canvas in Tinta. From the sheet of paper first, to the cardboard later, and finally to the canvas, the figures are traced in pen to fix the idea and composition, in felt-tip marker and chalk when transposed onto the cardboard surface, increasing the scale, and finally in acrylic paint when transforming the drawing into a large-scale painting.

Drawing is a regular feature of André Ruivo's work. In this exhibition, this practice is revealed in the fully completed detachable sheets of the notebooks. At this point, the notebook is taken everywhere and the drawing is executed in any context. It goes hand in hand with working as a press illustrator with different methodologies, deadlines and rules (for the newspaper Publico, O Independente). Or the construction of cartoons involving teams and other circumstances (as in the 2003 film The Fantasist).

Drawing emerges as a daily exercise, but in an approach not so much to what is seen, but to what is thought, a kind of interior drawing so often shrouded in the blackness of the private. A drawing that finds an echo in the trembling of what is recognisable in this singularity of what belongs to everyone: the feeling of being at odds with the other, loneliness, anger, transgression, discovery, curiosity, the complex relationship between couples.

This introspective gesture evident in the drawing also runs through the music conceived by André Ruivo. A member of Rollana Beat, during this period, and with the end of the band, he experimented with a solo project, self-publishing two albums in which the drawings appear coherently as a visual landscape for the lyrics and sounds conceived. The author's publishing label that had appeared around 1993 was once again used, this time with the release of a limited and numbered run of CDs.

In fact, it was exactly in the context of a concert at Lux Frágil, this time by Loopooloo, the side band of Rollana Beat drummer André Sentieiro, that some of these works were shown once. What's more, most of the drawings here are new.