Júlio Dolbeth

(Portuguese– Angola, 1973)

NARCOLEPSY - Original drawings and silkscreen prints

May 22^nd to June 29^th 2024

This year, Tinta nos Nervos participates, for the first time, at Lisbon Design Week, an initiative that aims to promote design and the arts creative, unifying different cultural facilities in the city of Lisbon, in a path and in a joint program that extends from May 22nd to 26th.

Júlio Dolbeth was the artist invited to present, at Tinta nos Nervos, an exhibition of his works, original and multiple, and to design a exclusive image for the tea to be created especially for the event, by Companhia dos Chás.

On May 22nd, Tinta opens doors for a preview, and on the 25th welcomes the artist for the official inauguration with a guided tour and cocktail.

Julio Dolbeth about the project on his own words: “Narcolepsy transports us to the world of dreams and invites us to explore this border between wakefulness and sleep, where barriers of reality dissolve. The exhibition includes drawings that come from my notebooks, many sometimes testimonies of a moment where concentration is more difficult and where the drawing flows almost automatically.

Narcolepsy, a neurological condition characterized by episodes of extreme drowsiness and cataplexy, is the symbolic resource for when pencils take on a life of their own and dreams invade in an unpredictable way my visual metaphors. These are narrative fragments that suggest new stories by juxtaposition or mere random connection. The dreamlike and the reality are inextricably intertwined, challenging conventional notions of consciousness and experience. This exhibition includes a set of drawings, isolated from notebook pages and digitally edited to promote new narrative interpretations. To this were added new drawings with pencils and washes that propose readings, sometimes alternative, sometimes complementary, where each image tells a story full of subtext and suggestion."

Overview

Júlio Dolbeth was born in Angola in 1973,  lives and works in Porto, Portugal. Has a degree in Communication Design from the Fine Arts Faculty of Porto, MA in Multimedia Art, and a PhD on Illustration. Julio teaches Design and Illustration at the Design department at Fine Arts Faculty of Porto University.

He is co-founder of "Dama Aflita", a cultural association and Art Gallery dedicated to illustration and drawing in Porto.

Júlio Dolbeth likes to draw random faces, friends faces, some made-up faces, sometimes a lumberjack, sometimes a snow white lots of times until she comes perfect. Once in a while invented plants, most of the times a log, sometimes a skull trying to be proportional. Most of the drawings are in his head, many of them in his sketchbook, some of them are hanging on a wall, a few of them are published and part them are a collectable in some friend's wall.