MAY 25 | OSVALDO FERREIRA

"Revivescence: A Journey to the Present," | Osvaldo Ferreira [ANG] Individual Exhibition

ERITAGE, in partnership with the contemporary art gallery THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE, developed Osvaldo Ferreira first solo exhibition in Europe,". The show opened the art week in the Portuguese capital.

Osvaldo Ferreira (b. 1980, Angola) explores themes associated with the everyday life of the Angolan society, evidencing an intergenerational continuity / discontinuity with regard to social experiences.

His work, primarily constituted of paintings, often integrates chromatic and material elements that refer to the African textile tradition of exuberant colors. With this, he aims to emphasize the presence of Africa’s cultural and social heritage – a continent that, through colonization and globalization, witnessed successive processes of appropriation and cultural manipulation, triggering involuntary miscegenation and the imposition of a system that degenerates the continent’s identity.

Bringing together 20 new works produced over the past year, the exhibition proposes, through representation in painting, the emergence of a new status for the image of contemporary relational staging in the urban space of the Angolan capital.

Through a unique aesthetic construction, marked by the exacerbated use of color, the reinvention of traditional African fabric patterns, and the deconstruction of stereotypes long mediated in the field of painting, Osvaldo Ferreira shows in this exhibition the invisible aspects of a social history woven into the daily life of the city of Luanda. 

Through a continuous exercise of research, experimentation, and questioning, the author is locally proposing and redefining new paths for figurative art, with forms of representation and images that surprise us by their oppositions and contrasts and which, for this very reason, are integrated into the space of a modernity that has long been in charge of deconstructing traditional aesthetic categories.

Osvaldo Ferreira is exhibiting a body of work that - in drawing, color, composition, the heterodox model for representing the feminine, and in the continuous reinvention of the construction of the scenic space of painting - is affirmed by the freedom of creation, proposing to expand its limits, against aesthetic and social conventions, against academism in the representation of the world, and in favor of the continuous expansion of the artistic sphere and the construction of a local praxis.

Taken together, the title "Revivescence: A Journey to the Present" and the themes explored by the artist in his work suggest a process of rediscovery and reclamation of African cultural and social heritage, and a recognition of the need to acknowledge and address the legacies of colonization and globalization in order to build a more equitable and just future.