The EMERGE — Cultural Association and the Casa da Avó Gama joined to show the small-format painting work by the artist Nuno Alexandre. An artist selected in the first edition of the publication Portuguese Emerging Art. An editorial project of this association from Torres Vedras.
Bakamukuá, the title of the series of paintings that gives the name to this exhibition, is a word with origins in Kimbundu, one of the official languages most spoken in Angola. Signifying “from another place”, it closes in itself the notion of transnationality and affectivity that is translated to us in the word “saudade” (missing) of that other place from where we came from.
Nuno Alexandre was born in Lisbon, in 1989. Alexandre was a student of Mário Rita, an artist who influenced him primarily. Since then his interest in painting and drawing has been increasing and became self-taught. Alexandre feels drawing and painting as an escape from everyday life and reality, where these are distorted and malleable. His style is abstract and can be figurative – of the importance of the human figure as an emotive content of the work – with the expressionist, rude and automation traits.
It is doing and undoing, in the beginning, in the redo, in the dissatisfaction with the unfinished work, that stimulates the conclusion of the same, until it becomes what it is supposed to be. It is the metaphysical and existentialism that moves Nuno: the will to do, to experience. To be put to the test, without rules or restrictions.
An Emerge organization curated by Jorge Reis