URBANO AND SOFIA AREAL WORKS EXHIBITION AT SALA ROMANTI CULTURA IN CASINO AZORES

30 works curated by Ana Cristina Baptista, a show open to the public until 31 January 2025

(In)temporal Dialogues brings together 30 works by two leading names in contemporary art: Sofia Areal, an artist from mainland Portugal who lived on the island of São Miguel for four years, and Urbano, an artist born and raised in São Miguel.

This exhibition invites us to suspend time, to look beyond our temporal limitations and experience art as a portal that transports us to a dimension where past, present and future coexist in harmony. This exhibition reveals timelessness as a fertile field of possibilities, a journey that leads us to question our existence in time and the fleeting beauty of things. Here, art is not just an expression of the moment; it is an open door to infinity, where time vanishes and only essence remains.

Although Sofia and Urbano have different artistic paths, they share a strong connection with abstraction, colour (or the lack of it), nature and emotion. While Areal focuses on a more gestural and energetic language, Urbano incorporates a greater connection with the natural environment and a more contemplative sensibility. In both cases, the works abstract and synthesise the world around them, creating visual dialogues that invite the visitor into a unique sensory and emotional experience.

Sofia Areal, known for her abstract language, works with color and form in a vibrant way, exploring the dialogue between matter and spirituality. Her compositions are full of dynamism, where spots, lines, circles and colors merge into a visual field that stimulates the imagination. The circle in her work is not a static figure; it is movement, it is pulsation. It emerges as a fundamental symbol of her plastic grammar, suggesting continuity, transmutation and an interconnection between all things. For Sofia, the circle represents life in its fullness - it's where everything fits. It is the synthesis of existence, a form that encompasses the beginning and the end, the interior and the exterior, and which connects all the dimensions of human experience.

Looking at Urbano's works, we realize that the forms already existed on an ethereal plane, shaped by the light of emotions. A palette strongly inhabited by blue reveals in an almost minimalist way the bench where his grandmother sat reading the Bible, contributing to a dreamlike feeling, in which the function of the object is more linked to personal meaning than to realism, “September #3”. We continue our “journey” through her memories, which gently emerge, like a promise, and gradually lead us to an explosion of color, full of fragments of childhood. This climax, of an almost Fauvist vibration, is mirrored in “September #6”, a work of strong, vibrant colors. This fresh memory that has become real, and which, being intimate, is also universal, gradually fades back to its ancestral place in “September #12”.

It is with this timeless dialogue that we begin the Cultural Bridges project.

About Sofia Areal
Sofia Areal was born in Lisbon in 1960.
One of the most important Portuguese artists of our times. She began her artistic training at the Herefordshire College of Art & Design in the United Kingdom, attending courses in Textile Design between 1978 and 1979 and the Foundation Course between 1979 and 1980. Her initial interest in tapestry technique is directed towards painting and drawing, due to the time associated with the production process, where she finds speed, the instant, and in them she satisfies the freedom of the impulse, the surprise and the accident, and the exploration of a unified relationship with the supports and the materials. In Portugal, she attended the painting and engraving workshops at Ar.Co, between 1981 and 1983. Exhibits collectively since 1982 and individually since 1990.
In her composition, she searches for a solar ideal, an aesthetic of beauty, of what is pleasant, of pleasure, of harmony, which she seeks in the relationships of balance, between background and composition, between line and surface, between textures and smoothness, between opacities and transparencies, between the solid colours of a palette in which reds, yellows, blues, blacks and whites predominate without renouncing the presence of secondary colours, and finds in the formal contrasts that emerge from the instinct of her avowedly muscular gesture, which inscribes the personal.

Collections: Modern Art Center, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal; Serralves Foundation, Oporto, Portugal; Casa da Cerca - Contemporary Art Center, Almada, Portugal; Elvas Museum of Contemporary Art, Elvas, Portugal.; Funchal Museum of Contemporary Art, MUDAS, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal; A.N.A. Collection, Lisbon, Portugal; FEVAL, Caceres, Spain.; Carmona e Costa Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal; D. Luís I Foundation, Cascais, Portugal; PLMJ Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal; Millennium bcp Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal; Fundação Oriente, Macau, China, and Lisbon, Portugal; Novo Banco, Lisbon, Portugal; Banif Mais Bank, Lisbon, Portugal; Afundación, Obra Social ABANCA Galicia, Spain; Palmela City Council, Palmela, Portugal; Ponta Delgada City Council, Azores, Portugal; Carlos Reis Museum, Torres Novas, Portugal; Centro Cultural Raiano, Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal; Ponte de Sor Municipal Library, Portugal; Vodafone Collection, Lisbon, Portugal; Alberto Caetano Collection, Lisbon, Portugal; Figueiredo Ribeiro Collection, Abrantes, Portugal; L. Ferreira Collection, Lisbon, Portugal.

About Urbano
João Urbano Melo Resendes was born on the island of São Miguel, Azores, in 1959. He studied printmaking at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, 1995/7. In 1998 he took part in the Kaleidoscope Programme: The Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm and Tavira Print Workshop.
In 2000, with his solo exhibition “Os Primeiros Frutos”, he inaugurated the Fonseca Macedo Gallery in Ponta Delgada, with which he collaborates.
Until 2023 he had 50 solo exhibitions and took part in more than 100 group exhibitions. Since 1997, he has been represented by 111 Gallery in Lisbon.
In 2015 he was awarded the “Insígnia Autonómica de Reconhecimento” by the Legislative Assembly of the Autonomous Region of the Azores.
He lives and works in Porto and the Azores.

Collections: Carlos Machado Museum, Ponta Delgada; Angra do Heroísmo Museum; Arquipélago- Contemporary Arts Centre, Ribeira Grande; Presidency of the Regional Government of the Azores, Sant'Ana Palace, Ponta Delgada; Regional Culture Directorate; Rectory of the University of the Azores, Ponta Delgada; Caloura Cultural Center, Lagoa, São Miguel; José Berardo Foundation, Lisbon; University College, London; City Museum, Lisbon; Public Library and Regional Archive of Ponta Delgada; Portuguese Embassies: Brasilia; Stockholm; Zagreb; Madrid and Unesco, Paris; Presidency of the Republic Museum, Lisbon; Manuel de Brito Collection, Lisbon.