Mind Set Art Center is honored to collaborate with Portuguese artist Rui Miguel Leitão Ferreira and present “Outdoors – Paintings for a Post-Pandemic World”, his first-ever solo exhibition in Taiwan and Asia. The show will run from March 4 through April 14, 2023 and features over 30 of Ferreira’s newest paintings. We extend a warm invitation to you to join us and explore the artist’s latest work.
For Rui Miguel Leitão Ferreira, expressing his thoughts and pushing boundaries through painting has always been part of him. A native of Portugal (B.1977, Lisbon), Ferreira has shown a unique awareness since a young age, capturing any passing element of interest, such as the beats of techno music or the color hues of 80’s video games, and transforming them into vivid colors and sharp brush strokes. During his formal art training at the University of Lisbon and later on, at the Goldsmith’s College, Ferreira pushed his further painting into the realm of abstraction by experimenting with elements of informalism and minimalism.
When the pandemic brought the world to a halt, Ferreira acutely felt the impact of the various restriction protocols everywhere he went: he was barred from social gatherings and confined indoors on many occasions. This sudden distancing from society elicited an intense sense of isolation that’s deep-rooted within him. “Outdoors – Painting for a Post-Pandemic World” is a collection of Ferreira’s latest paintings. It encapsulates the artist’s thoughts and inner reflections on the drastic changes, as well as his imagination of a world that’s no longer there.
The scenes in Ferreira’s paintings are akin to a series of movie freeze-frames, capturing moments of people engaged in chatting, surfing, sunbathing, etc. These came straight from the artist’s mind as he imagines seeing these from the window of his studio. With his fluid brush strokes rooted in decades of abstraction painting, the artist has reduced people and their backdrops into intertwined lines, dancing color patches and geometrical relations between humans and other subjects. These techniques allow him to accentuate the essence of each frame: the sensuality of the human bodies, the unbridled expressiveness of their kinetics, the vastness and unknown nature of what lies in the distance. His work displays a duality on many levels: the free-handed drawing elicits a sense of palpable chaos, where a faint order of things are embedded. This inner contradiction is mirrored by the subjects and the circumstances in which they are created: people at the height of their joyous gathering, captured during a time of bleak isolation and agonizing longing for a world that once was.
In the post-pandemic world, “Outdoors” is no longer a real place. It is an artificial construction in which we preserve the warmest memories and the emptiest of hopes.
