“The work of the artist is characterised by an approach that crosses different fields, going beyond traditional boundaries between disciplines. Painting emerges as the central axis of her practice, expanding into three-dimensional forms. In this exhibition, Catarina Branco (Ponta Delgada, 1974) transforms her garden into a battlefield for the construction of hybrid images.
This exhibition situates itself in an interval, a place of transition between painting and sculpture, between botanical delicacy and dense, rough matter. This is not a garden of perfection or a refuge of order. It is, rather, a human gesture that seeks to come to terms with the disorder of nature or imagination. The works in this exhibition express beauty, but not safety; they evoke a nameless place that serves creative desire, as Natália Correia said of the (poet-)artist who is occupied with inventing the world.
In this space, a process of unlearning is proposed (“To know how to see without thinking, / To know how to see when one sees,” Alberto Caeiro): the landscape is not a stage, but a state of mind — it is reality itself, imagined.
If, in many cases, the garden is an act of reconciliation, here it becomes an act of unrest, resisting the discipline of forms, where Catarina Branco’s untamed forms may, perhaps, domesticate the inevitable force of nature.”
José Macas de Carvalho
Curator for the Visual Arts — PDL26 Portuguese Capital of Culture.
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