Filipe Rodrigues (1978) was born in Vila Nova de Gaia, where he lives and works. He graduated in Fine Arts – Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP) in 2002 and obtained a Master’s Degree in Visual Arts from the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Porto and FBAUP in 2009. He currently attends the Doctoral Program in Plastic Arts, also at FBAUP.
In addition to knowledge, an uneasiness and willingness to confront his work with other proposals and ideas mobilizes him to the Academy. This is one of his most important human characteristics: a humility, not bent, that makes him question his processes and conceptual and plastic choices, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, persistence in the search for authors who help him in the process of understanding his own painting, the Art, the market and the world.
He has countless individual and collective exhibitions, in Portugal and abroad, also participating in several projects as curator and promoter of other artists. Combining the activities of painter and teacher has enabled him, over the years, to a state of itinerant residence that puts him in direct confrontation with different micro cultures and local routines.
Filipe Rodrigues draws and paints compulsively. Almost as if his breathing depends on that motricity. Nonetheless, there is in his painting a programmatic and language coherence, whose common denominators extend to the palette coming from the universe of pop; to the prevalence of the figurative combination of body and landscape, in a dimension that oscillates between urbanity, the situation details, the universe of cinema and the desires of consumption by postmodern society; to the great importance of drawing, which takes the voids, creating layers of interpretation and relation to another dimension of pop culture that is the traditional or rural; and, finally, in the great care that, in the density of the represented, there is a narrative suggestion that seems to be an expression of the inner underworld of the artist. With his pictorial language, Filipe Rodrigues aims to tell us a story.
PRESENT VIEW is a kind of retrospective of the last 10 years, but viewed and analyzed in the eyes of what the artist is today. In all, there are about five dozen works available to the public’s attentive eyes that the painter, never forgetting his condition as teacher, student and cultural consumer, seeks to challenge at the construction of other narratives, different from his own, trying to make his reactions timeless. The exhibition presents, mainly, acrylic on canvas, but also watercolors on paper, drawings and a site-specific composition, revealing the enormous involvement that the artist himself had in the entire process of assembling and interconnecting painting and architecture.
Helena AM Pereira
shairart’s chief curator
