André Ruivo

Retratos: the originals - Drawings 

December 7 2024 – February 1 2025 

“It's me. It's you. It's us.  

In André's growing calligraphic economy, now spent recording the world around him with the humour of a cartoonist, the artist indulges in the wanderings and luxuries of a baroque pause in order to fix these "Portraits", made up in pastel. "Retratos”have a deceptive anonymity: we suspect that André doesn't run far to write the souls of these intriguing characters. Family, friends and neighbours are all here... The dystopian anatomy of the creatures may seem like a caricature, but it's pure reality, seen through André's eyes. "Retratos” are an act of love and a hymn to human diversity, they distil tenderness in their tow hair, squinting eyes, impossible noses, rainbow colours and bargain props. There are stories emblazoned on these pastel faces and unfathomable and unsuspected depths that are hard to imagine. Portraits that make a mockery of a pictorial genre and the venerable beards of western art history, in a pop way that doesn't hide the roots of another of the artist's achievements, “Breakdance”, a previous book of fond memory. These "Retratos” are already a classic in our little world of visual arts. Call it Neogrotesque, Neopsychedelic, I don't know. What I do know is that they're asking the discerning eye of the critics for a certificate of adulthood and winking at acquisition for a public museum or secret collection. So you wish, so it shall be.”

Jorge Silva, Designer 

Draughtsman, illustrator, animated film director and musician, André Ruivo (Lisbon, 1977) is a multifaceted artist whose creative activity has a driving force on publishing artist's books.

Beyond the characteristics of the media he uses and the demands of the disciplines he works with, his discourse is based on visual narratives that mix observation, commentary on reality or various imaginations with informed and entertaining experimentation with drawing materials. Through single images or those unfolded in sequence, he follows the small plots of the day without necessarily having a diaristic intention, but rather the desire to hold a thought, captivate a real situation, point out some dreamlike contradiction. These are precise drawings, with a single stroke or in a drawing-stain, which, in their experimental exercise, do not shy away from the rawest and most textured, the chromatic appeal despite the more usual black and white, the manipulation of paints or drawing materials. Images in which tenderness, even if born of a harsh comment, is always revealed by the empathy created with the most complex or intimate daily situations and human beings. The same intentionality in a stripped-down, legible shot, centered on a figure in action, emerges in his films 

Retratos is a project of great impact in André Ruivo's body of work. It stems from the desire to create a gallery of portraits that are not faithful representations of a model, but rather plastic exercises in which memory and its transformation become fundamental.  

This exhibition presents to the public for the first time a series of eleven drawings made in dry pastel on Canson paper. Each sheet reveals a portrait, the expressive image of a face, at a considerable size, facing the viewer. The faces are not recognizable, although some are based on the artist's observations, metamorphosed by memory.  

This is, in the artist's words, “a collection of invented characters, people who don't exist, but have the right to a portrait. False neighbors, teachers, civil servants.” They are scratched with intensity, figures full of energy, the linear line becoming shapeless matter, a densely chromatic pictorial plane. They are “looking at me, at the readers, life-size”.  

The drawings have been digitized and fully transposed into a book, designed by Jorge Silva, with the first edition published by Mmmnnnrrrg in 2017 and the second by Tinta nos Nervos in 2019. The book - conceived as an artistic object - sought to be faithful to the original drawings, maintaining a large size and graphic quality, the chromatic intensity of the figures, the closeness generated by the warm tone of the paper and the handling, on an immense scale, with the suggested unfolding between who sees and is seen. And this Pop dimension of the book inevitably calls for the public to interact with the reproduced images.  

It's a larger work that can be approached in two ways - original drawings and a book - a special moment to enjoy the dialog between drawing, painting (due to the materiality of the scriber) and the multiple, due to the transposition through printing, in a book. The close connection that the artist establishes between drawings and books is reinforced by the fact that he has always resisted exhibiting, and refused to sell, originals of his publications. It is therefore with particular pleasure that Tinta nos Nervos welcomes this project and the originals that gave birth to it. 

Tinta nos Nervos.