Or the continuous drawing

“One of the 10 best exhibitions of 2023”
– Expresso newspaper

The Museu de Arte Contemporânea/CCB is marking the deposit of the Teixeira de Freitas Collection with the presentation of the exhibition Ou o desenho contínuo [Or the continuous drawing], a selection of contemporary drawings by more than 50 artists. Inspired by the title of a book by Herberto Helder (Ou o Poema Contínuo, 2001), this exhibition presupposes an understanding of drawing as a continuous process of artistic practice.

Until the popularisation of photography and, recently, its global adoption through smartphones, drawing was the only artistic process experienced by everyone, without exception, from the first attempts at representation to functional and schematic drawings. This exhibition takes the field of drawing to comprise artists’ preparatory drawings, project drawings, drawing seen as a specific medium, architect’s sketches, random doodles, school notebook pages full of reproductions of manga heroes, scribbled down directions and makeshift maps, schematic summaries of meetings, organisational charts, the schemes with which we try to guide our future choices, maps, and scientific drawing—in short, all graphic activity of inscribing. These different types of drawing are very diverse, ranging from everyday informality to intentional drawing practised in the context of the arts.

The Teixeira de Freitas Collection includes a strong component of artists’ drawings, from projects to works in this specific medium. While working at Madeira Corporate Services, a consultancy company based in Funchal, sometime after having started his personal collection, the collector decided to embark on the creation of a drawing collection in collaboration with the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa. This initial group of drawings, now part of the collection as a whole, reinforced the collector’s interest in drawing as a practice of thought and project in the context of the visual arts. This conceptual aspect corresponds to the very nature of drawing: the line is a marker between interior and exterior, yet it does not exist in the world (things do not actually possess outlines). Even so, lines are very effective, visually and cognitively, as a representational system, and form part of our personal development from an early age.

The choice of artists represented is very broad, including figures with extensive careers and other names that were just emerging at the time of acquisition. Thus, alongside artists such as John Bock, Julie Mehretu, Martin Kippenberger, and Julião Sarmento, there are others who are much less well-known, revealing the collection’s capacity for risk and its attentive eye for contemporary drawing. The typologies are also very diverse, extending the understanding of drawing to very different formulations, some even questioning the nature of drawing as a medium or expanding it into space in three-dimensional constructions.

This exhibition, which will unfold in two stages, organises this diversity of typologies and concerns into eight sections or themes: the representation of the body, political intervention, the use of maps and schemes as a way of organising the world, the thematisation of form, architectural references, everyday life, writing as a drawing exercise, and drawings that reflect conceptually on the practice itself. The different themes are placed together in dialogue and reveal the enormous diversity of drawing practices, from the emphasis on graphic components to clearly conceptual approaches.

These sections are signalled in the exhibition by a gradation of tones on the gallery walls but are not explicitly identified. Like a game, it is up to the viewer to identify them and possibly criticise the proposed organisation—not least because many of the works could be included in more than one classification.

A second part of this exhibition will continue the presentation of this large and diverse collection of contemporary art and will be inaugurated in the same space, on a date to be announced in 2024.