Dry Stone

by Luís Amado

“My passion for sculpture awoke while walking past walls of dry stones, aligned one by one over the time by hardened hands, in the Portuguese Natural Park of Serras de Aire e Candeeiros. The shapes of these white stones, molded by rain and wind, always troubled me. I started picking up one here, one there and bringing them home, without really knowing what to do with them, nor even what to tell them….until the moment I found myself speaking to them. It was an emotional and silent dialogue in which I learned to respect their structure, their intimacy, and from time to time to even accept their advice. This is how I grew into a “sculptor”… Each of the pieces I present in this exhibition are the result of an intense dialogue aimed at preserving the original surface of the stone, its textures, the musk and lichen giving them unique colours, that is, the living memory of the stone’s own nature.”

by Luís Amado

“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

At the first semester of 2015 a compendium of fossils, minerals, rocks and cerebellums were exhibited at Marfilpe’s Atelier I&R, gently yielded by the colector José Teixeira from Minermós.

The exhibition had a variety of natural stones, presented to the public in their most pure and delicate state.

The stones in the collection, all founded in the region of Porto-de-Mós, delighted the visitors by their aesthetics, resulting only and exclusively of its natural formation.

These stones were brought from de center of nature, to the center of your world. The result could not have been better.