The Power and The Stones - Permanent Exhibition

“The Power and The Stones, the title I chose for my first individual exhibition, justifies a brief explanation to the visitors.

With this exhibition I resume a path that I ceased thirty years ago, after in 1982, having participated with a dozen works in stone, at a colective show in the city of Funchal.

At the time I was attending the Superior Institute of Plastic Arts of Madeira and had as teacher, the sculptor Anjos Teixeira, “the master“, as everyone called him, a generous and delicate man, of conventional education and tastes, by whom I had special afection, and would hide my “stones” from, so I wouldn’t shock him. That was not sculpture acoording to his criteria.

Therefore the work was done in the house garden, away from the school, with ineffable pleasure and criative accomplishment. I discovered a personal language that each new stone enriched with its density, its texture, its skin, its crystals, its secrets…

I learned little by little to speak with the stones and I would never be alone again.

At the beginning the affinity with the matter, the smells, the noise of mineral vibrations, the colors that imply in every stroke. After the tense dialogue, in that intimacy that the science disaproves and the art demands from us, without words, without ideas… Subject and object only, in their unequal condition…

The experience was so strong that I felt like embracing sulpture in full time. However, the circumstances draged me to other life, other activities that, with short interruptions, kept me intensely occupied, particularly in the last few years. But the “stones” were always present, like an “addiction”… In such a way that I kept collecting them in my travels around the world, to work them later, when the opportunity came.

This exhibition is the result of that opportunity and that “addiction”, that protected me from the worst of all addictions, the addiction of power…”

by Luís Amado