Globotomy

In his second solo show with Quadrado Azul Gallery, Rigo 23 presents a series of works executed in a distant 2017. The four artworks were first shown at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, and at Millennium Gallery, Lisbon, then Ibero-American Cultural Capital.

During the two-person show in Frankfurt with Brazilian artist Ayrson Heráclito, the exhibition’s title was Entre Terra e Mar - Between Land and Sea - Transatlantic Art; and in Lisbon’s touristic center it was Itacoatiara[i][1]. Now, in 2020 at Quadrado Azul Gallery, located between the Júlio de Matos Psychiatric Hospital and Padre António Vieira School, the exhibition assumes the title Globotomy.

Rigo’ s work challenges the idea of art being insulated from its surrounding context; it pushes against the notion of art as phenomena which is easily isolated, catalogued, collected, priced, presented and preserved between walls and pages. For over three decades now, Rigo’ s artistic production rarely occupies the same territory, its untidiness reflective of a disordered search rooted in the vertigo of the abyss. Born on Madeira Island, the artist has spent the majority of his adult life in the Far West’s fascinating dystopia - in dialogue with Indigenous and Black experiences. In this exhibition, he presents works produced in close collaboration with communities and individuals from a Far West much less travelled by European curiosity - the Southern hemisphere’ s, with which Portugal’s history is entwined and indebted.

The exhibition includes four works: a video which resulted from an action carried out by members of three Guarani Villages on a Cardoso Island beach, today known as Itacuruça[2] - in the Southern region of the state of São Paulo, Brazil; a stone sculpture representative of a sacred territory trespassed by a border; a bamboo encasing with wood and found materials from the beaches of Cardoso Island, in route to Itacuruça; and a drawing in Indian ink and embroidery charting a Guarani scream through European territory in 2017.

[1] Colored stone, in Guaraní, the first designation given by the Guarani to the painted stone marker that a Portuguese expedition placed in 1502 on their territory defining a point on the border created by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.
[2] Stone cross in Guarani, and today’s name of the beach where the marker was placed in 1502 designating a point on the border created by the Treaty of Tordesillas.