The exhibition “Silvestre Pestana - Um artista de contraciclo” (Silvestre Pestana - A counter-cycle artist) highlights the visual artist, poet and performer Silvestre Pestana and features a work by a master's student from School of Arts.

Based on works from the Serralves Collection, as well as works from the artist's own collection, the exhibition highlights the intersections between poetry and the visual arts that mark his practice, highlighting the pioneering use of video, performance and installation in the confrontation between society, art and technology.

The intervention of the work Radiologias (1979), supervised by Professor Joana Teixeira, was carried out by Francisca Lafuente, a Master's student in Conservation and Restoration.

The work consists of a set of light boxes that present poems built on medical X-rays, revealing how the artist's visual language is an integral part of his body (“The poet who sees himself in transparency”). The intermittence of the light source in these Radiologies seems to point to the fragility of the system(s) in question - physical, social, political, technological - giving them an elegiac quality, like vanitas of the contemporary.

The student developed her dissertation with the aim of defining and testing conservation strategies that would make it possible to circumvent the technological obsolescence and degradation of the radiographs. To this end, exhaustive and detailed documentation of the work was produced and an alternative LED lighting system to the original system was designed.

Until October 13, the exhibition can be visited at the Galeria Solar da Porta dos Figos - Casa do Artista, in Lamego. It is part of the Serralves Collection's Itinerant Exhibitions Program, which aims to make the Foundation's collection accessible to diverse audiences in all regions of the country.

More information here.