On the occasion of the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Portuguese Cultural Centre – Camões, in Luxembourg, is presenting a set of paintings by Ilda David’, produced between 2019 and 2020.
The “Une lumière de printemps” (“Light in Springtime”) exhibition consists of 27 acrylic on canvas paintings, chosen from four series — Águas Estreitas, Desvios da Natureza, Deméter, Dafne (Narrow Waters, Deviations of Nature, Demeter, Daphne) — and will be on view until 14 May.
Curated by Nuno Faria, the current artistic director of the City Museum in Porto, the exhibition references the visual arts that characterise Ilda David’ and the work she has been creating for four decades: “an artistic universe where the image and the work, literature and painting, are combined in a fruitful, challenging way”, he explained. The exhibition includes a wide range of drawings (and some engravings) “whose common denominator is the unwavering diversity of the language of nature”, according to Nuno Faria.
The artistic production of Ilda David’, who was born in Benavente, Portugal, in 1955, “is like collecting and preserving botanic species, aimed at turning life into art and art into life”, the curator continued, paraphrasing Eça de Queiroz on the books of Júlio Dinis: “a place where you go to breathe”.
“Things are never really what they seem. These paintings are atmospheric existences that communicate cosmically with images and texts from other times. They are portrayed as fields of experience and understanding of existence as a spiritual and metaphysical reality, one that overcomes time and space, all the differences and hierarchies between us (all living beings) and the world, between reality and our perception of it. Reality is breath”, Nuno Faria concluded.
“Une lumière de printemps”
27 paintings (acrylic on canvas), produced between 2019 and 2020 and chosen from four series:
- Águas Estreitas (five canvasses, 2019, 80 × 60 cm and 100 × 120 cm);
- Desvios da Natureza (four canvasses, 2019, 80 × 10 cm);
- Deméter (five canvasses, 2020, 40 × 30 cm);
- Dafne (13 canvasses, 2020, 40 × 30 cm).
