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Established in 2010 and consolidated in its present form in 2013, Underdogs works with a diversified roster of Portuguese and international artists connected with the urban inspired contemporary art universe, fostering the development of close relationships between creators, the public, and the city with the aim of promoting art as an everyday experience.
“Ah, if only I were who I am... What a triumph that would be!”
– Mário de Sá-Carneiro, 1908
This was the year when everything was interrupted. The year when we were forced to stop, to turn towards the interior (of our homes, of ourselves), to leave outside the echoes of the world and face what we really carry within us, what really makes us, what we really are. The year when, being so used to constructing and projecting our image, especially in its online dimension, through a meticulous curatorship – embellishing, aggrandising, hyperbolising, sublimating –, we were forced to embrace reality, to look at our emotional baggage, to confront our fears, to learn how to deal with uncertainty, to accept the limits and shortcomings which, in spite of everything, make us more, and not less, human.
The reflection that Mário Belém brings to his second solo exhibition at Underdogs Gallery, in the form of an entirely new body of works, takes stock precisely of these two extremes that consume us daily in the relationship we have with our own identity – of a raw reality and an enlarged reality, of truth and fiction. Above all, of the need that impels us to create new, and simulated, realities for our public persona, of the act of hiding ourselves behind multiple layers, of, as the artist himself highlights, “always wanting to be more fantastic than we really are.”
Playing with the very stratification that gives shape to these actions – a gesture that also extends to the poetic imbrication present in the titles –, Mário Belém materialises here a set of visual narratives with a universal scope in pieces with various formats that blend the mediums of painting and sculpture in wood, visual representation and the written word.
One part wild, one part gold fish, a minor part of solitude, two parts spacefarer, some other part a delicate flower, impart everything, add a generous amount of fertilizer (guaranteed result in six weeks).
Mário Belém
including VAT
Acrylic on wood 165 × 135 × 15 cm Unique piece 2020
