Mal-me-quer
Rita Ferreira's painting extracts ephemeral elements and old memories from her personal archive, transforming them into visual representations whose legibility is often excluded and deferred. The singularity of oil on paper juxtaposed with the rejection of the traditional frame, almost always in favour of iron or brass supports, creates a play of contrasts between the gestural brushstrokes, the fragility of the paper and the weight of the metal structures.
In Mal-me-quer, Ferreira continues to explore the archival format by using the entire gallery area as a container of drawings that visitors will be able to browse through. The artist will present several large-format paintings based on sketches and works that have at some point been rejected or undeveloped, supported by iron structures that are suspended from the gallery ceiling. The works allow enough space for viewers to navigate between one drawing and the next. The installation takes over its surroundings, thus taking up the artist's research on parasitic plants (whose starting point was in 2019 with the exhibition Parasita, at Travessa da Ermida), which in one way or another have thrived in the artist's imagination and personal history.