The set of drawings that Teresa Gonçalves Lobo exhibits at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Funchal [Museum of Contemporary Art of Funchal] reflects an expanded and hyper-sensitive relationship with her sur- roundings, with the things in the world. This relationship is made of intensities and interiorities and those things – sensations, sounds, images, thoughts, vertigos, desires, mirages, objects – are processed and poured onto her drawings as if they had no shape, as if shapeless, as ema- nations of energy.
Things have a time but also a place. These drawings be- long, originate from the Madeira Island, where they are now on exhibit. Manuel Zimbro once showed me a map of the island, which is one of the most beautiful maps I have ever seen and also one of the simplest. In it, a yel- low patch appears (a tiny portion of land) surrounded by a huge, almost disproportionate, blue surface (an ex- tensive quantity of ocean). The Madeira Island has this scale when represented on a map and, at the same time, when we take it with us (yes, an island is not a dwelling, is something we take with us, stays with us for a lifetime) it is a huge sounding board, a machine that entangles landscapes, a permanent vertigo, an archaic and pro- found place, intense and excessive.
These drawings convey and represent this atmospheric place, are the materialization of that game of scales and affections, of possession and loss, are body and air at the same time, we enter them as if entering a map, abstract and concrete. Thrust, vertigo and fall, in that order.
May 2015
In Parte de mim exhibition catalogue, Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Funchal, Madeira, 2015