CENTRO DE ARTES DE CALDAS DA RAINHA

VISITA, a Jorge Leal’s exhibition

I have been drawing in museums since I was a teenager. It is the only way I find to relate to the pieces, to understand what they are, how they were made. To the pleasure of seeing I add the pleasure of drawing, which in turn gives me the pleasure of deep knowledge and memory. The strong emotions I feel in observing are only controlled by the concentration that drawing requires of me.

Part of the goals of the artist residencies I did at the Caldas da Rainha Arts Center during 2019 was to work from its collections (António Duarte, Barata Feyo and Leopoldo de Almeida). In the following years I continued to visit the museums to deepen my knowledge about the pieces and to interrogate them graphically through countless drawings in notebooks, in what constitutes my way of working on any theme. My body moved around the sculptures in a similar way as I do with live models, accentuating the degree of kinship between these two subjects. I realized during the hours I spent inside the three museums and garden that my attention was focused on details, mostly anatomical. The supporting points of the sculptures stand out against the rest of the elements and for this reason imposed themselves as the dominant theme.

In the studio during the artist residency and later in my studio in Lisbon, the notebook drawings served as a starting point for making enlarged versions where the drawings materials do not correspond, for the most part, to the reference drawings. Many of the drawings I present are the result of successive attempts to find the right gestures and proportions for the enlarged dimensions. I do not use optical aids, magnification grids, or preparatory drawing, since I am interested in recovering the tension of the first drawing, the freshness of the fear of failure, and the graphic exuberance of hesitation.

The drawings transform the sculptures into another entity, with distinct physical and material characteristics. If many sculptures exist in a first moment as speculative drawings, my drawings interpret them and take volume and mass from them, returning them to that hypothetical initial existence.

October 2021

Jorge Leal