André Romão | Flores

garcía | galería is pleased to present its third solo show by André Romão.

The exhibition proposes a fantastic night voyage, from the first sculpture Moonrise to the last video Sunrise, a night where normal interactions between bodies and entities are suspended, and where the borders between human and animal, natural and artificial, cultural and vegetable blur.

Romão’s work has developed over the past ten years on a diversity of media, from poetry and sculpture to installations and video works. Exploring often-problematic interactions in cultural and environmental macrostructures, by means of an extensive collection of small actions, objects, and appropriations. Strongly anchored in poetry, Romão’s work uses or appropriates materials in a speculative manner, deeply rooted in the legacies of both Surrealism and the Baroque—in what can be understood as a continuous sabotage of codes and expectations.

The first Room of the gallery presents a series of new sculptures that continue Romão’s exploration of the contamination of both artificial and natural forms, the hybridization of bodies, and the life-like presence of inanimate materials. This works embody ideas of mutation, adaptation, and resistance, as well as a predatory, viral quality analogue to economical processes—such results in a borderless fluidity between Man and Nature, animal, mineral, and vegetable, abstract entities and real inhabitants of the land. Presided by a schematic representation of a moonrise, Pierna aperts to mutate from wood into animal and Cabeza (el hambre del monstruo) seems to inhabit a limbo between the sculptural, the human and the mineral, as for Pie, in an evocation of Dafne a foot transforms itself into a flower.

In the second room of the gallery Sunrise, filmed outdoors during the night and the break of day, responds to the moonrise in the first room. The video will document the surreal interaction of a group of ferrets with a sculptural fragment of a human body.

André Romão was born in 1984 in Lisbon, where he lives and works. A selection of his solo exhibitions include: Museu Berardo; Lisbon (2019), GaleriaVera Cortês, Lisbon (2017, 2015) garcía | galería, Madrid (2017); Syntax, Lisbon (2016); The Green Parrot, Barcelona (2015); Macro—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2014); Middelheim Museum, Antwerp (2012); Galleria Umberto di Marino, Naples (2011); and Kunsthalle Lissabon (2010).

His work has been presented in group exhibitions in Meetfactory, Prague (2019), Tenderpixel, London (2018); MAAT, Lisbon (2017); CentroCentro, Madrid (2016); FUTURA, Prague (2016), CAPC—musée d’art contemporain, Bordeux (2015); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Olso (2014); Serralves Museum, Oporto (2013 and 2010); Fundação Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2010) and City Museum, Lisbon (2009).