RED LIGHT: Sexualidade e representação na Coleção Norlinda e José Lima
26 september 2020 — 4 july 2021
Curator: Sandra Vieira Jürgens

RED LIGHT features a selection of works from the Norlinda and José Lima Collection dealing with sexuality across multiple topics that are presented both as complementary counterpoints and dissonant confrontations: the representation of the body, male and female nudity, eroticism, fantasy, desire and pain, object and subject, pleasure and domination, the places of female representation, the male gaze, voyeurism, exhibitionism and self-representation in art. To speak of sexuality and the relationship between bodies during a pandemic that required restraint of, and even abstention from, physical contact is also to reflect on the consequences of distancing as it takes place. What are the conditions made available by the simultaneous fragilization of the individual and the community, conditioned by fear of contagion, to a collective and individual encounter of bodies? What could be the role of evoking the eroticism (or the erotic vocation) of art in revaluating desire and the risk of a society henceforth more attentive to the meaning and the implications of physical proximity? Bringing together different origins and periods, the works on show are organized on the margins of a monolithic vision of the theme, the chronology and any attempt to neatly categorize art movements. The exhibition includes works by more than seventy artists, such as Alberto García-Alix, Albuquerque Mendes, Álvaro Lapa, Andres Serrano, Eduardo Arroyo, Graça Pereira Coutinho, Gonçalo Pena, João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, João Penalva, Júlia Ventura, Pedro Casqueiro, Mauro Cerqueira, Muntean/Rosenblum, Nancy Spero, Rosa Carvalho, Ricardo Valentim, Vasco Barata and Sam Samore. With this transgenerational panorama, with its multiple approaches to an essential and fundamental dimension of existence, RED LIGHT generates a space beyond convention, moralism and manifesto and extends an invitation to sensitive and intuitive contact with the works, reclaiming visual pleasure and acknowledging the attraction of pictorial and photographic eroticism.