The exhibition ERNESTO DE SOUSA: KEEP IN TOUCH (06-04 - 11-05-2019) at Diferença Gallery gathers a group of works and documents that belong to the Isabel Alves and
Ernesto de Sousa’s private collection. The invitation Isabel made to Pedro Barateiro and Ricardo Valentim to organize organize this exhibition came up in a conversation between friends.
The documents gathered are from drawings to envelopes and correspondence that Isabel and Ernesto maintained with a group of friens, most of them artists and people working within the portuguese and international cultural scene. The drawings in envelopes,
photographs and objects will be presented as part of a living archive that is made of documents, art works and editions that constitute the network of realtions maintained by Isabel and Ernesto. Among the objects exhibited there is a hat made by Ernesto to is friend Robert Filliou, but also correspondence wil Daniel Buren, a preparatory drawing to Além - Tejo, Vos - Tejo by Wolf Wostell, the catalogue of Documenta V together with a group of swiper-slides taken when Isabel and Ernesto visited the exhibition, along with group of intervened invitations by Helena Almeida for her shows at Galeria Diferença and Galeria Quadrum, among many other things. The work Ernesto has made evokes the necessity of the collective in search of the singularity and subjectivity of each person. To present this collection’s works and documents is a necessity. To look at Isabel and Ernesto’s archive is, on one hand a tool to think how portuguese visual arts has been taking care of itself through a newtwork of relations that are many times taken as autophagic; and on the other hand reflects the lack of a more definied narrative for portuguese culture in a country that many times seems to be not so interested in itself. But Ernesto’s work has always tried to build a narrative that escapes categorization. The idea that art is present in many things, not only in isolated and easily capitalized art works is a possible reading of Ernesto’s production, manifested by the books, postcards, letters, envelopes, drawings, scultptures, paintings and the films that surrounded him.
The necessity to keep presenting the work and archive of Isabel Alves and Ernesto de Sousa comes from the multiplicity of connections that they’ve always kept, and still do, with a group of nacional and international agents.
On the occasion a brochure was published by Isabel Alves, Pedro Barateiro e Ricardo Valentim, in a limited edition of 30 copies.
https://www.rtp.pt/play/p5355/e400017/as-horas-extraordinarias?fbclid=IwAR3bhhYY5cgcRHUKiSfLNk0Zqu74FZXjlWRuUBvJt8A-jmkZsbdU_HtIg5w
