Quarto de Visitas is a new Drawing Room Lisboa program created to respond to its main mission: show the best of contemporary drawing through the new idiosyncratic, hybrid practices of current artists; both Portuguese and foreigners. The fair receives numerous requests from European galleries proposing interesting creators whom it can hardly accommodate in its limited space. In this seventh edition of the fair, its director, the Spanish curator Mónica Álvarez Careaga, pays tribute to Portuguese hospitality by bringing together three prominent artists who have marked their own position from which they approach their drawing work.
In its first delivery Quarto de Visitas summons three different proposals of European drawing: the enveloping abstraction of Carsten Fock, represented by Zeller Van Almsick (Vienna), the dramatic figuration of Susanna Inglada, represented by Galerie Maurits van de Laar (The Hague) and the manic but fertile graphics of Olivier Gruber, represented by Invisible Galerie (Marseille).
Carsten Fock (Germany, 1968)
ZELLER VAN ALMSICK Vienna, Austria
Creator of images of great subjectivity, this German artist who was a student of Per Kirkebi, and spends time on the Danish coast, has a Nordic soul, easily described as romantic.
Managing the resources of abstraction: the balance between colours, masses, gestures and textures and using pastel applied directly, Carsten Fock seduces us with his evocations of atmospheric phenomena, clouds, lights and other changing manifestations of nature in beautiful images where occasionally a figurative object fits.
Fock’s paintings and drawings are close to Turner: landscape is a major genre, a way for introspection and knowledge.
Susanna Inglada (Spain, 1983)
GALERIE MAURITS VAN DE LAAR The Hague, Netherlands
Susanna Inglada’s drawings explore their own disciplinary limits, acquiring borderline characters, such as spatiality, animation or performativity.
Inglada was initially trained in performing arts and constructs her works with the mentality of a collagist or set designer who would use her own drawn images. Her figures, monumental and dramatic, are arranged in a chaotic manner, as in a deranged choreography where the dancers only partially appear. Human limbs and unexpected objects interact with a certain violence, fighting to occupy the space they are constructing with their suggestion of movement.
It is an appellative representation of the social issues that interest the artist: ambition for power, inequality or motherhood.
Olivier Gruber (France, 1969)
GALERIE INVISÍVEL Marseille, France
Olivier Gruber’s drawings could be placed between the tradition of French botanical drawing (Redouté, Picot de La Peyrouse…) and the terrifying children’s illustration of Maurice Sendak, but his particular flora and fauna come from a technical self-limitation and an imagination in constant production.
Olivier only draws with coloured pens, creating delicate patterns and beautiful scratched surfaces that reveal the inseparable relationship between drawing and time.
If we define monster as a fantastic being that combines elements of several species and awakens powerful emotions in those who contemplate it, we can judge these works as attractive monsters, astonishing in their details and pleasant in their colouring, unique examples of their species.