2019
This series goes a step further then the previous work in identifying the boundaries between showing a subject and showing how it is shown.
Surfaces of Conversion experiments with the visual ways of converting the subject on to its own surface of presentation. The subject is released from its narrative obligations and becomes the mode it is shown. The new realm of layers, cuts, frames and structures of display produce a shift in the expectations on the viewer: not to identify what is seen but to assess the limits of they are looking at.
Drawing from a wide range of research and reference material, Abrantes incorporates her records of art systems as well as imagery from her family archive, decontextualizing the familiar to create new meanings
(selected pieces)
2017
I am a long time collector of books, newspaper articles and found images. They seem to be the only type of things I am attracted enough not to abdicate.
The images I am driven to usually depict views of unclear boundaries. Ambiguous angles of the body or architectures of display such as beams, structural columns, stands, encasings or back skeletons for support.
I am drawn to the edges of the picture, the borders of a portrait or the limits joining building and landscape. By using images where the main subject is replaced by its frame or its possibility of exit, I am ruling presentation over representation. Each picture opens an “edge-space” for another one to come in.
For the We Are Backstage, that transversal space is edited from mass media generated imagery defining femininityand the sense of female.
The exhibition aims to expose the vulnerability of representing one feminine , by abolishing any hierarchy between the structures of presentation and the representation itself
(selected pieces)
2010
A set of oil paintings on paper and canvas developed around the idea of exodus and the possible architectural fiction for surviving exile. The desert of Mars functions as the ultimate independent scenario, unresponsive to geographical, topographic or political references, while the architectural elements grow hydroponically. Together they compose retro futuristic postcards that celebrate the experience of the Desert as an essencially alter modern experience.
(selected pieces)
2015
This work is a visual parody to the current state of the (public) relationship we have with our body: all things today are aimed at erasing the body, its presence and physicality. This body is now a readily available digital prop with a hectic social job, like a proper God our “new body” is absent and omnipresent.
This collection of collages, drawings and large scale photographs focuses on the remnants of this new God-body made visible. A body composed by ruins and floating debris.
(selected pieces)
2016
This collection of drawings and collages explores political and historical omnivoyeurism. It layers architectural cut outs over collected images of places (Germany, Cyprus and Portugal) that no longer exist as illustrated. The images are altered with the intension of highlighting a certain sense of phantasmagoria of the here and there. This series speaks about the enchantment of the idea of ruin as well as about the disenchantment produced by the sense of loss.
All structures referenced suffered changes due to abrupt economical and political events.
(selected pieces)
2004
A year long project involving photographed and written documentation, drawings, paintings, performance and video installation. It is an aesthetic attempt to give formal translation to the untranslatable Portuguese word “saudade”, under the influence of Fernando Pessoas´s Book of Disquietude.
The work does not invest in representing “saudade”, a composed feeling of nostalgia and missing that is claimed to be the core of Portuguese cultural construction. Instead it aims at presenting the concept “saudade” out of its context. Using images connoted with the experience of “saudade” in new scenarios, exposes it as a tool of public control by the National Dictatorship/ Second State regime (in power from 1933-1974).
(selected pieces)
