Inês Viegas Oliveira

The heart withdraws from all things - Original works

From 22 January to 20 February 2022.


The set of drawings by Inês Oliveira that Tinta is presenting are quite diverse where themes, visual strategies and even materiality are concerned. This should come as no surprise, considering how this was a constellationof works created under the aegis of a set of diverse texts written by Andreia C. Faria, read in a spectacle presented at the Teatro Municipal do Porto.

A constellation means an overall, meaningful drawing that emerges from the connection of quite diverse objects. What unifies these drawings is, first and foremost, a desired escape from the evermore urgent problems of the world, whose terrifying noise almost prevents thought and even life. At the same time, another common trait is a return to the supposedly idyllic moments of childhood, in which the possibilities of actual solutions are still present.

Inês Viegas Oliveira

(Portuguese- Tavira, 1995)

‘This abandonment happens on screen with its folklore of set phrases. Like a joke someone tells at the back of the room, people die in the Mediterranean, heads are raised like cattle, a continent burns. And each one of us is the monster of our time, the monster that this time brings forth, shoulders on which to carry the illusion that there is nothing beyond a time that is called human. We no longer see faces, we no longer recognise the voice, the language, what is alive in us. Eyes no longer bring us a look. The hands of other men and women are terribly similar to our own, absurd and meticulous. The heart withdraws from all things.’

Andreia C. Faria. Clavicórdio (Língua Morta, 2020).

After taking a quick look at this set of images by Inês Oliveira, the impression will arise that there would be a way to reunite these images through the honey of narration, but the elements are dispersed, the links are only guessed at and then dissipate, or on the contrary they don't form but stubbornly fantasise.

Being created by the same hand, and living together in the same space and circumstance, there is an emphasis that unites them, but one senses something else, difficult to express in decisive concepts. Let's start with their factual origin. This cycle of drawings was created for the ‘Quintas de Leitura’ sessions at the Municipal Theatre of Porto, based on poems and texts by Andreia C. Faria. Faria, from whose words the title of the exhibition is taken. Considering the choice of this verse, Inês Oliveira says that it reflects the idea that ‘the only solution for living is to remove the heart from things, because the intensity of the world, poverty, war, discord, global warming... are too much’. But at the same time, the author confesses that there is ‘an attempt to recover the innocence of childhood and the impossibility of doing so’.

On the one hand an escape, on the other a return, without any paradox in the dynamism of this movement. It's understandable, then, why the final drawings retain traces and signs of the first gestures, as if the sketch were the final drawing, or the final version didn't fail to reveal the accidents along the way. A degree of dirt, of graphic noise, of a haze that is almost always present in the images we see here, less like screens of distance than confirmations of attempts to return that invite empathy, if not understanding.

In addition to the epigraph above, Oliveira also drank from the following verses, also by Andreia C. Faria. Faria, in the making of these drawings:

‘You get to old very briefly.

The child waits for the infallible

fluorescent bone, offered with the newspaper,

the marvellous jawbone of a dinosaur

of whom it will become, undone

the impure impression of beauty,

a worthy contemporary.’

In As beautiful as any boy (Língua Morta, 2017)

The drawings are therefore not only a response to the poet's words, but also to the feelings that unfold in this relationship with the world. A fascination with the instant ruins offered by the contemporary world - be it a cheap fluorescent plastic bone or an institution that has barely been founded and is already obsolete and marked, as Walter Benjamin would have it, by the acts of barbarism that made it possible.

That's why the curiosity of this gaze, of correction, one could say, of the tumults of the world, can wander as much through hurried crowds as through apparent offices of quiet curiosity, in a moment of wandering. The ghosts of a possible narrative lead to the creation of small transits of fit and individual relationships between images, as if we were travelling backwards and forwards, closer and further away from some continuous scene... In these dozen images there is a sense of a cohesive gesture appearing to be born behind the variety of objects and themes. The images themselves do not attempt to present themselves with common, homogeneous or closed lines of force - hence the use of ‘cycle’ above, not ‘series’ - but rather vogue with very different attentions. Although we can see how figuration presides over their production, the angles and proximity of the objects of attention vary, as do the lighting, colour choices and the objects themselves.

That said, the human figure is always present. If not as a direct presence - distanced, fragmented, hurried - at least as a reflection, shadow, captured image, or trace of a passage separated from the scene for seconds: the light left on, the arm of the record player that hasn't finished the track, the fallen petal. The potential, even in the Aristotelian sense, (of) the narrative of Oliveira's images is reinforced by the insistence of the titles, which depart from a practice of disarticulating meanings associated with some contemporary art, and reveal novelistic clues to interpretation. If we consider the relationship between the texts and the images postulated by Barthes, we can discover here those corrections allowed by the return to the openness of childhood, and specifications, forwarding of focuses, temporal organisations, poetic awakenings, but also increases in enigma or surprising absurdities. Which always force the heart to beat differently.

Curriculum

(Portuguese - Tavira, 1995)

Solo Exhibitions
 
2022  Ventanias, Correntes e Esperas, Biblioteca Municipal de Albergaria-a-Velha, Aveiro
2021 Bartlebyana, Casa André Pilarte, Tavira
2020 Circadiano, Casa das Artes, Tavira, Circadiano, Livraria Bruáa no Convento de São Francisco, Coimbra
2019 Descarousel, Galeria Jóia, Lisboa

Group Exhibitions

2021 International Exhibition, 1916 Workshop of Cultural Heritage Park (Ministry of Culture), Taiwan
2020 Illustrators Exhibition, Itália, China, Japão

Awards / Recognitions

2022 Finalista na Exposição de Ilustradores da Feira do Livro Infantil de Bolonha
2021 Menção honrosa Novos Talentos Fnac na categoria de Ilustração
2020 Seleccionada para a Exposição de Ilustradores da Feira do Livro Infantil de Bolonha.
Seleccionada para o projecto europeu Every Story Matters, onde escreve e ilustra histórias inclusivas

Other

2022 Ilustrações para a revista Vida Simples, edição de janeiro “Simplificar”
2021 Ilustrações para livro “A Cama, a Mesa”, Paul Éluard, Edições Barco Bêbedo
Ilustrações para a sessão das Quintas de Leitura “Aposto tudo numa elegância ferida”, com poemas de Andreia C. Faria, Teatro Municipal do Porto
Ilustradora convidada no YETI Youth Education Through Illustration
Auto-edição do flipbook “Descarousel”, impresso em risografia no Mago Studio
2019 Jardim Botânico X<https://www.materiaprima.pt/detail.php?id=65600>, um projecto em serigrafia da Lavandaria

Press

2020 "Ilustradora (...) Feira do Livro Infantil de Bolonha"<https://mag.sapo.pt/showbiz/artigos/ilustradora-ines-viegas-oliveira-selecionada-para-exposicao-de-feira-do-livro-infantil-de-bolonha>, Diário de Notícias

Online

Instagram: @inesviegasoliveira
Loja online : http://ivoliveira.com/loja