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Ernesto de Sousa at the XIX Cerveira Biennale

Ernesto de Sousa at the XIX Cerveira Biennale
on the tribute to Ernesto de Sousa by the Cerveira Art Biennial Foundation - ---- -------ERNESTO DE SOUSA: “THE RIGHT HAND DOES NOT KNOW WHAT THE LEFT HAND IS DOING ... .." - ------- Curator: Paula Pinto------- ------- XIX Bienal de Cerveira, Vila Nova de Cerveira - A word about photography... it is both the point of arrival and the starting point. Photography was present in Ernesto de Sousa's entire multidisciplinary course (1921-1988), functioning simultaneously as a document and thought, without defining the boundaries between the recording of others' experiences and the artistic objects that made up his bio-bibliography. The unpublished photographic materials of this exhibition demonstrate his continued interest in folk art and Portuguese sculpture of popular expression during the sixties. Without specificity's detriment of these same objects, we highlight the use of photography as a tool and expression of their thinking, through three assemblages of means and objects: the making of a film, the curating of an exhibition and the editing of a book. This analysis confronts the author 's gaze with the photographic object and with the means of producing and editing the photographic image, in an exercise that reveals the intimacy of Ernesto de Sousa' s work both in the approach to study themes and in the material conditions of the his work, witnessing the complexity and experimentalism of his visual universe. We can find on display the scratched photographs from the shooting of the film Dom Roberto (1962), the photographs from the exhibition Barristas e Imaginários: quarto artistas portugueses do Norte (Potters and Imaginaries: fourth Portuguese artists from the North), organised at the gallery of the bookstore "Divulgação" (Lisbon, 1964), photographs published in the album Para o Estudo da Escultura Portuguesa ( For the study of Portuguese Sculpture) (Lisbon: ECMA, 1965) and also unpublished material of the survey on the "Popular, historical and current expression of Portuguese Sculpture" which Ernesto de Sousa compiled during his years as a grantee from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1966-68).