Arte Ecológica: Árvore na Floresta do Cimento [Ecological Art: Trees in a Concrete Forest]

Throughout art history, and specifically the history of painting, landscape has been primarily a backdrop for seemingly more significant political, mythologic, or religious events. Only in the 19th century did it start gaining prominence, assuming a central role as an artistic genre. Since then, landscape has become the primary subject of many artistic works created by aesthetic operators who have explored it in the most diverse ways, respecting its formality, inhabiting the fragments that compose it, or exploring its various subgenres.

In the works on display here, one can easily identify a gesture over the landscape, which defines and, later, dissects it. The pieces bring the idea of landscape closer to that of nature, an ancestral and endangered notion due to the prolific process of urbanization. Thus, we arrive at this contemporary bucolic feeling: fragments and vestiges, heralds of a larger landscape.

Built throughout the institution’s 60 years of existence — and shown many times — CAPC’s contemporary art collection is a fundamental asset for mapping an alternative art history in Portugal.

Daniel Madeira

Biblioteca António Arnaut — Biblioteca Municipal de Penela
Av. Infante Dom Pedro 1, 3230-277 Penela