OS PIRÓMANOS EXHIBITION

EXHIBITION

Os Pirómanos

AUTHOR

Rui Moreira

GALLERY

Pavilhão Branco

DESCRIPTION

I was drawing in a house in Trás-os-Montes, where I usually spend a few seasons, when I decided to go to the window. From there he saw two fires in the distance. He went back inside, took a book he was going to start reading and saw the phrase “I’m a giant lost in a burning forest”.

It was 2666, Roberto Bolaño’s book, and that first line, a coincidence. “It just happened. Things don’t always need a conceptual explanation”, says Rui Moreira to the GPS. The phrase served as the title for a work (and for an exhibition that was at MUDAM, in Luxembourg), which is part of the exhibition that opened this Saturday, 24, at the Pavilhão Branco, in Lisbon.

Literary references, such as cinematographic ones, are a constant in his work dedicated to drawing. This is the case of The Landscape Tangle Machine and Telepath III, made from the work of Herberto Helder, or Our Lady of the Abortion, which joins an image of a film by Tarkovsky to the Birds of Hitchcock. You can see a series of 12 large drawings (so large that one of them needs six arms to be carried) made between 2007 and 2015.

They are geometric, landscape and figure drawings, and have an extended period of time and density – one of the drawings, for example, took five months to make. “Each drawing is a world in itself, and deep down this is a constellation of several worlds”, he explains. All but one are unpublished in Lisbon.