- Ana Cardoso
Leaky Abstraction
MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology
Mar 29 – Sep 11, 2023
Curated by João Pinharanda
Leaky Abstraction, an exhibition by Ana Cardoso – finalist of EDP Foundation New Artists Award 2017 – is based on her research around the medium of painting. Exploring optical illusions allowed by the geometry of forms and a gestural and material based painting, Cardoso combines and simultaneously sabotages historical solutions of hard-edge and abstract painting with craft based practices: mixing or connecting dyed and hand-woven unpainted canvases with hand-painted industrial canvases, for instance.
The title – Leaky Abstraction – appropriates a concept used in software development and explores its relationship with abstraction. The latter would be unable to hide all of its concrete details; some information gets lost. Cardoso transfers these ideas to the field of painting, where abstraction, generally understood at odds with figuration, evokes the body in a suit of events. In her work, abstraction is grounded by a structure regulated by modular and geometric forms that are both independent and generic (although defined by the artist), – references to the history of abstraction, formalist strategies, etc. – as propositions for and of the body. Abstraction thus promotes leakages within this structure.
Textiles seem to appear as painting’s core and its ground, and weaving as a surface generator, in dialogue with the history of abstraction. It matters to highlight Ana Cardoso’s interest in making the weave visible, being it the basis for painting – an organic and mechanical process, a practice that links to composition, experimentation, writing, the moving image, or the creation of musical scores.
The exhibition space is transformed into a scenographic experience composed of a continuum of hanging vertical strips – hand dyed and woven –, traversing the exhibition and directing the visitor. The group of works on display propose an immersive installation, a sequence whose elements dialogue and cross-complement – from the work titles, to phenomenological and spatial relations, to the elements that emerge, get lost, and communicate between canvases.
Ana Cardoso (Lisbon, 1978) lives and works between Lisbon and New York. Her multifaceted painting practice employs an array of medium-specific approaches: from abstraction to formlessness, materiality to illusion, conceptualism to the ready-made. She explores painting’s elastic content in relation to its context, its production in relation to its presentation; and pivots between the viewer and the history of painting. For her, throughout history but also in this digital age, the viewer activates and performs the painting, its flatness and its depths. She works with predefined structures – modular canvases that fit comfortably the length of her open arms, triangles, squares, parallelograms, rectangles – that mutate into dynamic new compositions which are then again reshuffled, recombined, performed, stacked, or moved through a vast landscape of fragments. Cardoso’s paintings reveal different dimensions throughout the diverse moments of their production and distribution process. Optical folds are suggested when the works are installed; her configurations play with recto-verso concepts and three-dimensionality; her folded strips present recto and verso simultaneously and become performances that integrate the broader site of painting. Within Ana Cardoso’s inclusive painting corpus, Neo-Concretism and Formalism stand out as open source alphabets that the body inhabits to reformulate former logics and parameters, using structure and the monochrome as vessels for romantic experimentation, site of accidents, questioning, contamination, encounters, and a continuous array of self-reflexive and mediated gestures.
Ana Cardoso received her MA in Fine Art from the Hunter College, New York, in 2006. She has had solo or duo exhibitions at Nuno Centeno, Porto (2019); Parapet Real Humans, St Louis (2018); Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva Museum, Lisbon (2018); Temnikova & Kasela, Tallin (2017); Jablonka Maruani Mercier, Knokke (2016); Andrew Rafacz, Chicago (2015); MNAC – Contemporary Art Museum, Lisbon (2015); Múrias Centeno, Lisbon (2014); Longhouse Projects, New York (2014); Maisterravalbuena, Madrid (2012); Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2012); Soloway, New York (2011); Conduits, Milan (2011); and Southfirst, New York (2008); among others. Cardoso was included in group exhibitions at Galerias Municipais – Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon (2022); Cristina Guerra, Lisbon (2021); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2020); Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2018–19); MAAT Museum, Lisbon (2017); Rachel Uffner, New York (2015); Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, Cluj (2012); Prague Biennial 5 (2011); Tate St Ives (2011); The Kitchen, New York (2009); White Flag Projects, Saint Louis (2008); and Culturgest, Lisbon (2007). Her work has been featured in Artforum, Flash Art, Mousse, Modern Painters, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Contemporânea and included in the book Painting Now edited by Suzanne Hudson and published by Thames & Hudson (London) in 2015. She has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2019–20) and was a fellow of Shandaken: Projects, Paint School master class, New York (2018–19).
Ana Cardoso (Lisbon, 1978) lives and works between Lisbon and New York. Her multifaceted painting practice employs an array of medium-specific approaches: from abstraction to formlessness, materiality to illusion, conceptualism to the ready-made. She explores painting’s elastic content in relation to its context, its production in relation to its presentation; and pivots between the viewer and the history of painting. For her, throughout history but also in this digital age, the viewer activates and performs the painting, its flatness and its depths. She works with predefined structures – modular canvases that fit comfortably the length of her open arms, triangles, squares, parallelograms, rectangles – that mutate into dynamic new compositions which are then again reshuffled, recombined, performed, stacked, or moved through a vast landscape of fragments. Cardoso’s paintings reveal different dimensions throughout the diverse moments of their production and distribution process. Optical folds are suggested when the works are installed; her configurations play with recto-verso concepts and three-dimensionality; her folded strips present recto and verso simultaneously and become performances that integrate the broader site of painting. Within Ana Cardoso’s inclusive painting corpus, Neo-Concretism and Formalism stand out as open source alphabets that the body inhabits to reformulate former logics and parameters, using structure and the monochrome as vessels for romantic experimentation, site of accidents, questioning, contamination, encounters, and a continuous array of self-reflexive and mediated gestures.
Ana Cardoso received her MA in Fine Art from the Hunter College, New York, in 2006. She has had solo or duo exhibitions at Nuno Centeno, Porto (2019); Parapet Real Humans, St Louis (2018); Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva Museum, Lisbon (2018); Temnikova & Kasela, Tallin (2017); Jablonka Maruani Mercier, Knokke (2016); Andrew Rafacz, Chicago (2015); MNAC – Contemporary Art Museum, Lisbon (2015); Múrias Centeno, Lisbon (2014); Longhouse Projects, New York (2014); Maisterravalbuena, Madrid (2012); Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2012); Soloway, New York (2011); Conduits, Milan (2011); and Southfirst, New York (2008); among others. Cardoso was included in group exhibitions at Galerias Municipais – Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon (2022); Cristina Guerra, Lisbon (2021); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2020); Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2018–19); MAAT Museum, Lisbon (2017); Rachel Uffner, New York (2015); Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, Cluj (2012); Prague Biennial 5 (2011); Tate St Ives (2011); The Kitchen, New York (2009); White Flag Projects, Saint Louis (2008); and Culturgest, Lisbon (2007). Her work has been featured in Artforum, Flash Art, Mousse, Modern Painters, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Contemporânea and included in the book Painting Now edited by Suzanne Hudson and published by Thames & Hudson (London) in 2015. She has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2019–20) and was a fellow of Shandaken: Projects, Paint School master class, New York (2018–19).
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