Abstract
The exhibition “Image on the Run: Júlio Pomar, Menez e Sónia Almeida”, curated by Sara Antónia Matos, follows the program of exhibitions of the Atelier-Museu that regularly looks to cross Júlio Pomar’s art works with the ones of other artists, this way establishing new relationships between the painter’s oeuvre and contemporary times. This exhibition aims to think about how Júlio Pomar’s work intersects with Menez’s, with whom he maintained an epistolary and artistic relationship of great complicity and admiration, and with Sónia Almeida, for whom Menez’s work was a reference during college. Around this idea of influence and contamination in the arts (taking these concepts as productive and not pejorative), we try to explore the way in which the images are fixated and simultaneously escape us.
The title, “Image on the Run”, is motivated by Sónia Almeida’s interest in Júlio Pomar’s work, namely the panels at the Batalha Cinema, frescos painted on the wall at the end of the 1940s and ordered to be taken down and destroyed right after, by PIDE [the political police during the Portuguese dictatorship]: images that vanished, were extinguished, that have been inaccessible ever since. From those images that escape us and of which only documentation exists today (photographs, drawings, the project and letters that are proof of the censorship to which the work was subjected to), contaminations were born that appear now in Sónia Almeida’s project for the Atelier-Museu.