Marco Moreira

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EURO-SIONADO in Fundación Luis Seoane, La Coruña, Spain

The working project the artist develops consists of a reflection on artistic practice and its methods. Focusing on drawing activity, it seeks to explore the limit of two-dimensional existence as the boundary of what is constructed as three-dimensional, aiming to establish relationships between representations and reality that foster investigation of this threshold. It also reflects on the role of the artist, art, and the viewer while enjoying the social interactions that derive from these activities.

Issues inscribed as a place through social relations, and treated with the concepts of interactive and interactivity to recontextualize ideas materialized as created objects, which, inserted into the creative processes of exhibitions as formal and dialectical syntheses, involve the field of art and life as products, resulting in the work developed and its poetic dimension.

The presented works consist of playful mechanisms (games) elaborated in the form of wooden boxes with transparent acrylic lids, sized for manipulation by visitors. Each box has the configuration of a map of 7 countries of the European Union (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden). Inside them, graphite balls move through a labyrinthine space full of obstacles, inspired by the forms of some paintings by artists from the 60s like the American Frank Stella.

The movements of the viewers while manipulating the pieces will generate traces drawn on sheets of paper placed there, representing the interpersonal relationships of the spectators with things and between them, throughout the exhibition period.

With this work project, the aim is to observe the poetics that intersect with formal differences that, through individual activities, in realizing intersubjectivity, summon life as a concept to form the holistic synthesis that addresses art and the unique thing.

Support: Concello da Coruña | VIARCO
Photographs: Iván Casal Nieto

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At the invitation of the “Estação” project, “Counterpoint Trains”, a work that brings together a set of 21 compositions by several Portuguese professional guitarists, was exhibited and listened to at the former Canelas Train Station in Estarreja.

Opening: March 25th at 5 pm, Rua da estação, in Estarreja.

“Counterpoint Trains” is a sound installation that takes as its starting point the vinyl record by Steve Reich, “Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint” (Kronos Quartet, Pat Metheny), released in 1989 by Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch Records. 92 picks were cut from this vinyl record, and 21 professional Portuguese guitarists were invited to create a guitar composition that evokes train sounds, using one of the cut picks for this purpose. Finally, and gathering all the compositions, a new vinyl record was recorded, titled after the installation’s name.

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Individual exhibition, in Fundación RAC, Pontevedra, Spain

Primus Movens

Curator: Anne Heyvaert

“The exhibition “PRIMUM MOVENS”, by the artist Marco Moreira, is the result of a collaboration between the RAC Foundation (Rosón Arte Contemporáneo) of Pontevedra and the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Vigo, in order to present the artistic results of research within the framework of the Doctorate in Creation and Research in Contemporary Art.

Here is shown a selection of works carried out during the preparation of the doctoral thesis entitled “Drawing machines: interactive and interactivity”, directed by Professor Anne Heyvaert, within the lines of the dx5 research group: “Field graphics expanded. The multiple that occupies the space”.

The title of the exhibition “PRIMUM MOVENS” refers us to an impulsive, primal, profound force that could symbolize the origin and transitivity of the creative act, exemplified here by the works of Marco Moreira. Through which, the artist seems to want to delve into the experience of the act of drawing, in its very genesis, which is not in the intention, but in its phenomenology, a phenomenology that results from the inherent interactivity, as he defends in his thesis doctoral.

These works, in the form of artefacts and mural installations (one specially designed for the RAC Foundation space), are like potentially interactive “drawing machines” that involve the viewer in the process, in the implicit movement that moves (in the etymological sense).

With well-defined protocols, Marco Moreira’s works are conceived and elaborated from the principles and essential elements of drawing: tools and materiality (graphite pencils, with the collaboration of the Portuguese factory Viarco), process and action, time and space. Repetition, multiplicity and automatism emphasize the human interactions that go through machines to finally express themselves as forms through drawings.

“In my work practice, I realized that inviting the public to interact actively in the construction and/or deconstruction of the work allowed the creation of an interactive relationship (artist/audience), but also to create an extension of the process from the workshop to the gallery or showroom; somehow indeterminate the author of the work and through interactivity incorporating within this same process / duration, the artist, the work and its public as fundamental elements that are culturally developed in common. ” (Moreira, 2019)

These pieces come to expose in a very intuitive and empirical way, what the artist develops in his theoretical research around the concepts of “interactivity and interactivity”, analyzing how both concepts operate in the production of a work of art. With the drawing machines, he affects the condition of the artist and the spectator as motors. The ideas of machine, motor, interactive, interactivity, body and drawing are integrated into the formation of the creative work.

Finally, these gadgets allow us to share an undoubtedly ancestral and essential idea of ​​drawing that, as a metaphor for the fusion of thought with the body and space, evokes in us a primary relationship of being connected with the world .”

Anne Heyvaert

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Soneca, 2021

Graphite on Canson paper, 1.5 cm wooden frame and glass

2 drawings, 68 x 50 cm each

Príncipe, 2021

Leftover used pencils glued together in the shape of hexagons,

65 cm height

Feliz, 2021

Graphite on Canson paper, 1.5 cm wooden frame and glass

4 drawings, 68 x 50 cm each

Atchim, 2021

Graphite on Canson paper, 1.5 cm wooden frame and glass

4 drawings, 68 x 50 cm each

Individual exhibition, in Galeria Modulo – Centro Difusor de Arte, Lisbon, Portugal

Espelho mágico, espelho meu! Há alguém mais belo do que eu?

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With title, 2017

Viarco pencils of different graduations glued

4 cubes of 80 x 80 cm each unit

With title, 2017

Viarco pencils of different graduations glued

4 cubes of 80 x 80 cm each unit

The floor of my studio has 14150 wooden sticks, 2021

Printing and graphite on Canson paper

5 framed works, 29,7 x 42 cm, 37 x 52 cm, 40 x 29.5 cm, 42 x 59,4 cm, 70 x 50 cm

The floor of my studio has 14150 wooden sticks, 2021

Printing and graphite on Canson paper

5 framed works, 29,7 x 42 cm, 37 x 52 cm, 40 x 29.5 cm, 42 x 59,4 cm, 70 x 50 cm

“[Drawing Machine] […] with the Sound of its Own Making”, 2019

Beech and pine wood, steel, lead, nylon, pencil, paper, four tire set and audio player.

100 x 70 x 70 cm

“[Drawing Machine] […] with the Sound of its Own Making”, 2019

Beech and pine wood, steel, lead, nylon, pencil, paper, four tire set and audio player.

100 x 70 x 70 cm

“[Drawing Machine] […] with the Sound of its Own Making”, 2019

Beech and pine wood, steel, lead, nylon, pencil, paper, four tire set and audio player.

100 x 70 x 70 cm

Untitled, 2017

graphite on Canson paper

18 drawings, each, 29,7 x 21 cm

Untitled, 2017

graphite on Canson paper

18 drawings, each, 29,7 x 21 cm

Untitled / Con título, in Fundación Luis Seoane, La Coruña, Spain

Photography: Iván Casal Nieto

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Untitled (pencils and drawing on the wall #9), 2021

Graphite pencils, cut at right angles and fixed onto the wall, drawing semicircles of different sizes through user interaction.

Variable dimensions

Untitled (pencils and drawing on the wall #2), 2015

Viarco pencils of different gradings cut at right angles and monted in circular shapes, fixed onto the wall, drawing concentric circles of different sizes through user interaction.

Variable dimensions

Collective exhibition A Função Perdida dos Objetos inThe Museu Oliveira Lopes, Válega, Ovar.

From December 8, 2021 to April 30, 2022

Curatorship and programming: Mónica Araújo
Organization: Divisão de Cultura e Desporto | Câmara Municipal de Ovar
Production: Museu Oliveira Lopes
Initiative: AXIS | aprendizagem criativa