Animalidades e outras botânicas: The trees all singing
Solo exhibitionCasa das Artes - Porto (organized by Sismógrafo)
May 2019
“You redden like the dawn and you burn: flame of the Sun”
"The trees all singing", title of the exhibition, is a verse by Gary Snyder, poet and advocate of a deep ecology. "The trees all singing." Shown on structures specially designed for the occasion, the works of Filipa Tojal are an invitation to meditation, to silence, to a reunion with this “greening force” present in nature and in every human being. Unfinished, fragmented, sketched. If, on the one hand, we can find these characteristics in the work of Filipa Tojal, on the other hand, their opposite is also true. The artist's work is finished, definitive, without any doubt regarding its position in the world. It’s up to us, spectators, to solve the puzzle, the enigma. It is up to each one of us to find the answer to these little pieces of nature, of art, made with pigments on Japanese paper, raw fabric and paper. An aesthetics of the fragment crosses this exhibition, apparently emerging from an archeology of the landscape through which the artist gleans mainly colors, movements and tensions, such as climate changes. The nature of Filipa Tojal thus mirrors the surrounding nature, with its mutations. And vice versa.
by Óscar Faria