SEBASTIÃO CASTELO LOPES

Portugal, 1994

GALERIA MONUMENTAL

In Work’s Words, visual poem and artistic manifesto from 2016, Sebastião Castelo Lopes (1994, Portugal) states the relationship of his work with words. Au Lecteur‘s (2019) recent drawings continue this intertextual play with poetry and also challenge the viewer, reusing and reworking, according to a work ethic of the artist, Baudelaire’s decadentist Ennui (Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère! ), at a time when Ennui seems to settle in from both sides. As João Valinho points out, Sebastião Castelo Lopes challenges us, and challenges himself, with works in which we are confronted “with a process of reintervention on the part of the artist, over several temporal amplitudes – from months to years. […] Beyond this contentious relationship between what is said, described, and their formal appearance, there is still their numerous relations with the unspeakable – the free correspondence of forms, in an emancipated plan of sensation, that Sebastião Castelo Lopes offers us. as possible and invites us to experience. To the reader, not in joy, sadness or boredom, but in full serenity.