Graça Pereira Coutinho (b. 1949, Lisbon, Portugal) began her academic journey in the mid-60s in the Sculpture course of what was then called the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa. Being disappointed with the extreme academism of that institution and with the political situation of the country, she sailed off to England, where she would, later on, proceed her studies at the Saint Martin’s School of Arts in London, the city where she has been living and working since the 70s.
Having initially enrolled in the Sculpture course (department by which the institution was most well known), she would later switch it by a post-graduation on Painting, which allowed her greater freedom to experiment and develop her first conceptual researches on what would later become the body of all of her future artistic practice.
About this practice, she would later refer, using the first person: 'The landscape relates to my body, my body relates to places, experiences and feelings.' This sentence, taken from the 1987 John Moores Exhibition (a then prestigious painting exhibition) catalog, seems to synthesize all of the recurring productive influences in the author’s work: the relation to landscape, the human marks on it, the metaphysical meaning of the performance act, the travels, the personal narrative... However, her approach to landscape has nothing to do with idilios pastoris - a structuring reference for the English landscape tradition - marked by notions of national identity and nostalgia; in the work of Graça Pereira Coutinho, the landscape is revealed by the means of an intimate, particular vision: in the fulfillment of the relationship with her own body and with the natural world, in the attention focused on the genius loci, the spirit of the place ( hence the importance of the journeys, which she often does), in the revelation of 'other paths, other worlds' - an inter-textual road that challenges any pragmatic or rational explanation, where the act of consciousness can be founded.
In extending and amplifying these concerns built over an almost thirty-year international career, Graça Pereira Coutinho is currently preparing her next one-man show opening the 2nd October at Cristina Guerra - Contemporary Art gallery. Titled '4 passos, 7 X', the planning of the exhibition is set after a selection of the material recorded at the Yellowstone Park (the greater and oldest public park in the USA, being extended over the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho). Far from being a naïve option, the election of this National Park for the video shootings confirms the artist’s modus operandi: on one side in the direct connection to nature, on the other by the park’s own symbolic weight, being the result of a vulcan’s activity, the remainings of another time and solemn witness to the Earth’s history (humankind included), that will, eventually, return to its activity after long centuries of sleep. This expectation for a foreshown catastrophe carries in itself the symbolic mark of a near end, of a natural ‘Armaggedon’ meeting the human-made corruption of the environment.
Starting from the triad Body (the author’s)/ Landscape/ Death as a reflection on the fragility of human condition, opposite to the natural environment and to the anxiety of a foreshown catastrophe, Graça Pereira Coutinho will present, in the extension of this show planned for the Sala do Veado of the Museu Nacional de História Natural da Faculdade de Ciências de Lisboa (that is related, in its theme, to the Yellowstone park), 12 new untitled videos, set in a video installation, screened on TV monitors (a simulation of the expositive devices of this kind of museum). Formally, an Earth (the planet) profile is delineated as opposing the subject’s presential localisation, set at the scale of the landscape. A visual poem by the author, qualifying the Earth, completes the installation.
In the gallery, still on video now presented on a plasma screen, the work 'Deserto' (2003) formally extends the same editing process, overlaying several characters and notes on the ecosystem over the deserted landscape that is presented. In the work after which the exhibition is titled, '4 passos, 7 X' (2003), 7 colour medium format photographs (produced according to the process mentioned in the title: 4 steps, 1 photograph, 7 times) reveal a 'living' lake through a performative process (the action of walking). A photo-print with the work’s title joins them.
Another installation is built after a large-size photograph, divided and set into 10 lightboxes, organized as in to simulate a flower bouquet, whose cables (the ‘stems’ of the bouquet) are tied by a rag, in a direct reference to the recurring natural materials in the artist’s work. In the opposite wall, functioning both as mirror (defence) and as confrontation (antagonism), a graphical installation introduces notes written on the landscape that is presented to the spectator, confirming the author’s interest on opposites.
Following the same typology, another colour large size photograph again reveals the Park´s landscape, here accompanied by a personal reflection by the author on landscape as a biographic metaphor.
Finally, in this new series of photographs, Graça Pereira Coutinho presents one last set of 6 photographs to which she overlays the emotion of the words that are directly connected with the driving concept of the exhibition project (i. e. Anxiety, Desire, Longing).
It will also be possible to see a new series of drawings (composed by 13 boards) dating from 2003 that continues to explore the content and the process of previous exhibitions such as The Walk or Regresso a Lisboa. Thus, the drawings, mixed media on paper, produced on different scales lead once more - as one of their titles(Delicate Paths) indicates - to the performing act of walking, the transverse axis of the whole exhibition, both at the object (documental) and at the conceptual level that works as a metaphor for a walk towards redemption or as a personal narrative of the process of growth and of the construction of memory, an ephemeral act always under reconstruction.
Working as a hinge between the previous work and the new production, connecting them both in formal (material, pigment, sand and gauze) and in symbolic terms (the connection to earth, the record of the body’s passage and the mark of the gesture), the new set of drawings functions as a palimpsest of the accumulation of experience and as a breviary of the natural elements collected in the artist’s travels. Formally, that which we are allowed to observe is, on one hand, the opposition between the strict present record in its support (technical architecture drawings) and the informality/symbolism of drawing and calligraphy that are inscribed on it.
HM.