ANTÓNIO BOLOTARaw

The will to create a set of specific conditions so that the banal confronts us with the impossible is part of the artist’s language. In this case, a set of eucalyptus trunks, collected during a forest logging action in the Alcabideche area, make an articulated and transformative journey to Sismógrafo, in Porto. The observer is invited into a silent environment, enriched and enhanced by the metaphysical charge that is articulated as the piece unfolds through the exhibition space. Preconceptions about matter and the exploration of the potential for transcendence contained in seemingly simple elements question the boundaries between what is a projection of the real and what is truly real.

António Bolota was born in Benguela, Angola, in 1962 and moved to Portugal at the age of 15. He currently lives and works in Lisbon. Trained as a Civil Engineer – an area where he has developed his professional activity –, Bolota renewed his interest in art in the 1990s, studying Art History and Aesthetics, and completing, in 2008, the Advanced Course in Sculpture at Ar.Co, Lisbon. His professional activity has frequently offered him the possibility to revive and give temporary new uses to old buildings undergoing reconversion. It was thus that he founded and helped to establish several independent exhibition spaces in Lisbon, such as Bartolomeu 5 (2003-2004), Avenida 211 (2004-2012) and Ar Sólido (programmed by Bolota and Marco Pires between 2013 and 2015). Located in a magnificent building on the Avenida da Liberdade promenade, the Avenida 211 space became a central place for visual artists to produce and present their work, featuring dozens of studios and some of the most dynamic exhibition spaces in Lisbon. Run by the artists themselves or young curators, these spaces included Kunsthalle Lissabon, Parkour, Barbershop, Escritório and Sala Bebé. António Bolota’s artistic work appears mostly in the form of sculpture where themes like the metaphysics of materials, weight, balance, engineering and architecture are used as tools to prepare a semantic field that confronts the viewer with elements of the physical world that we all know, generating new interpretations about the world itself.