Exhibition catalog "The Other as an Epiphany of the Beautiful"

When charting an itinerary through the vital spaces of the São Roque Cultural Pole, the exhibition The Other as an Epiphany of the Beautiful (from June 25 to September 5, 2021) emerges as a response to the call of the theme of hospitality as a design for a culture of the other.

Starting from sensitivity to public space, the theme of the exhibition echoes the practices inherited from the authors who instigated the subversion of the artwork, risking it as a tool for community sharing while still being a vehicle of intimacy.

The proposed works and path aim to connect with the generational pulse of a certain pragmatic idealism, in whose readings hospitality is intended to be inserted as a starting point in the journey that seeks to bring the other to the shared experience.

Essential Gesture, by Fernanda Fragateiro, is a work that seeks to reveal “an operation where the act of adding is inseparable from the act of subtracting,” considering, in Largo Trindade Coelho, “the need to empty before refilling, as a way to make room for the other.”

The Sacralization of Water, a drawing and sound installation by Pedro A.H. Paixão, in the Church of São Roque, created in Milan in the aftermath of a severe confinement period, proposes a delicate meditation that rescues us from the strange reality we are going through.

Sandro Resende brings the works of Anabela Soares, Cláudia R. Sampaio, Joana Ramalho, Micaela Fikoff, and Pedro Ventura, artists from Manicómio, to inhabit the Museum of São Roque in an approach to reversing the hierarchies of validation in the artistic medium.

The revisitation of Inside the Archive, by Joana Craveiro, at the Historical Archive and Library of SCML, can be situated as an ephemeral passage through the memory of an institution that punctuates and marks the time of the journey now proposed.

In Meeting – Thirteen June 2021, André Guedes addresses, at Brotéria, a fictional and artistic protocol to intersect the concrete reality of a resident community with an expanded collectivity.

Curated by Nuno Malheiro Sarmento, the re-presentation to the public of Rui Pimentel at the Convent of São Pedro de Alcântara asserts itself in the gesture of hospitality towards a work whose volume and density justify the exhibition of unpublished pieces by this painter without descendants.

Coordination: Maria Margarida Montenegro, Helena Alexandra Mantas, and Bernardo Cardoso, Culture Direction of the Lisbon Misericórdia; João Sarmento SJ and Matilde Torres Pereira, Brotéria

Texts: Alain Thomasset SJ, Claidia R. Sampaio on behalf of Manicómio, Helena Alexandra Mantas, João Pinharanda, João Sarmento SJ, Matilde Torres Pereira, and Nuno Malheiro Sarmento

Production support: Paulo Santos Costa

Photographic credits: João Ferrand, João Cachulo, Audiovisual Nucleus of the Communication and Brands Direction of SCML, and Pedro A.H. Paixão

Design and Pagination: Luis Chimeno Garrido

Year of publication: September, 2021
Publisher: Editorial Center of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa
ISBN: 9789899021440