Galeria

Digital leopard skin diary is the latest graphic diary of Francisco Vidal.

Graphic diaries serve as “itinerant workshops” for Francisco Vidal; in this case, a record of his wanderings between July 2009 and September 2010 in Lisbon, New York, Santiago, Chile, Viana do Castelo…

Francisco Vidal

After the outbreak of civil war in Angola, his father (born in Benguela), sister (Lubango) and mother (Santo Antao, Cape Verde), moved to Lisbon, where Francisco was born in March 1978. This moment in Angola’s history, in a determinative fashion, portends a European visual education, and, certainly, a Eurocentric point of view. He studies in Caldas da Rainha, where the old masters of the region, Malhoa and the brothers Columbano and Raphael, influence and impress him. In 2002, he returns to Lisbon and attends the Maumaus School of Visual Arts, where he comes into contact with artists such as René Green, Jimmy Durham, Ângela Ferreira, Rita GT and Ramiro Guerreiro. It is within the dynamics of this school that he develops the first drawings challenging the boundaries of post-colonial discourse. In 2007, in an artist’s residency at ZDB Gallery, he makes contact with Angolan artists Yonamine, Kiluanji Kia Henda and Ihosvanny, and here the Eurocentric point of view, imposed by his education, is newly questioned. This experience, on top of the crisis of economics and ideas, dominating public attention since 2007, prompted a further move. He went first to Berlin, from 2007-09, and then to New York, where he settled in Harlem, the neighborhood of jazz, and where he attends the Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia’s School of the Arts.

His work explores issues relating to borders, and crosses a number of different mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. Recently, in New York, he became interested in the writings of Sun Ra and his theory of Afrofuturism, in bridges of thought and in relationships with other fusion forms, such as Candomblé, Cachupa and Moamba, Funaná and Kizomba.