Draw to relief

SYNOPSIS
The exhibition presents a selection of 150 drawings made by the architect João Santa-Rita over the last five years. Contrary to what one might expect, these are not drawings referring to architectural projects. They are drawings that reveal a complex imaginary inhabited by a plot of lines that slides across the white paper like a labyrinthine dance desiring to come to life.

We can find affinities, and possible sequences among the drawings here exhibited; however, we also find an autonomy in each of them which is reflected in the impossibility of each one being dominated. We do not know which gods inhabit them... We only know that they come to life, and change their rhythm as they go along, unconsciously guided by the hand that reveals them.

The expression of each drawing is found by the eyes of the observer, who is also the protagonist. The possibilities of discovery are inexhaustible, and are always renewed whenever we look again at a drawing that we just saw a moment ago. It is then when we realize that our way of understanding depends on how we receive something and how willing we are to be transformed.
Drawings are filled with traces that reveal fullness, emptiness, balance, imbalance, shapes, tensions, energies; but it is us, with our gaze, who fill them with meanings. And when we suspect we have understood what we are looking at, we go back to the beginning, and imagine something different. Like an infinite journey. When we think we have reached the end, we start over again. The world doesn't change when we look at it, but we do. And so we start over and over again.

Curator: Bárbara Silva
Assistant: Mateus Atalla
Photographer: Pedro Escobar