Exhibition - Francisco Tropa, Paésine

The exhibition takes its title from the painted stones (pietre paesine) whose drawings of geological origin evoke painted landscapes which blur the boundaries between the figurative and the abstract. This concept of an analogy between the natural and the artificial is at the heart of Francisco Tropa’s work, which focuses on the conditions under which an image appears and is perceived.

Moving through the exhibition as it has been set up in the Villa Paloma, a few metres from the famous Observatory Cave which was occupied during the Palaeolithic era, Tropa takes a humorous and sensitive look at the origins of sculpture, his vocabulary of forms drawing on prehistoric Venus figurines and classic pietà, all the way through to the minimalist works of the last century. Practising a form of anarchaeology, he destroys any attempt at historical narrative and deconstructs the museum space itself, which becomes (once more) a Platonic cave. 

Visitors, who find themselves confronted with ambiguous materials and images of unfathomable depth, are invited to fully experience sculpture, in both its material forms and its symbolic projections.

This solo exhibition is being organised in cooperation with the Serralves Foundation in Porto, which will be showing another aspect of Francisco Tropa’s work at the same time. A joint publication covering both exhibitions will be released in January 2025.

Curator: Célia Bernasconi

Image: Francisco Tropa, Agate, 2023 – Light projection © Francisco Tropa