Julio Resende – O tempo e a forma

The exhibition — O Tempo e as Formas. Júlio Resende, 1950s — allows us to perceive and experience the dynamic nature of history, insofar as revisiting it leads fundamental experiences of human temporality, once questioned, to transform into a founding narrative. This constitutes a discourse that, with each update, shapes new perceptions of the past, present, and future. In this context, the present exhibition assumes an inalienable value, where identities are consolidated — “places of memory” — with an integrative and identity-forming function that we know was not indifferent to Júlio Resende. He perceived in them the signs of an existential trace, reflected in daily routines and in the seminal relationship between humans and the land, which allows us to found a projective energy from which the present is interrogated and the future projected.

The selection of drawings now presented, mostly dated to the late 1950s, whose chromatic reduction to the minimal reference of black and white emphasizes the harmonization of the real with the abstract, provides a more refined and striking vision of the conceptual issues that have always unsettled the artist. They reveal some of the most significant traits of his production, notably in figurative representation where the forms, through strong compositional purification and minimalistic affiliation, assume a poetic metric in the search for a metaphorical dimension. This is structured in an aesthetic language that reflects a system where drawing is fundamentally the expression of symbolic representation.