"Communicating Vessels", by Catarina Pinto Leite
Does nature inhabit me or do I inhabit nature?" asks artist Catarina Pinto Leite (Lisbon, 1963). In "Communicating Vessels", her new exhibition of paintings on canvas and paper, at the Cascais Cultural Centre from 5 July 2024, the painter revisits the nature of her places: where she grew up, where she lived and where she experienced deep relationships.
The importance of nature and the memories that endure over time is the theme that outlines the exhibition. For Catarina Pinto Leite, nature is an infinite source of inspiration and learning. In her pictorial work, she explores the question of landscape, both exterior and interior, intertwining it with her own experiences.
This is how her memories of a trip to Tuscany and the work of Emily Dickinson that she read at the time, especially the poems in which the American author talks about flowers, gathered in "Herbarium" - a book about her collection of plants - form the basis of the series of works that she is now exhibiting in Cascais. There are also echoes of the paintings of Mark Rothko and Nicolas de Staël, and the tradition of herbariums, such as Dickinson's or Lourdes Castro's, and still lifes. These are large-format paintings, almost exclusively in shades of green, which evoke the plant kingdom. As well as paint, the artist also manipulates torn sheets of paper which are then applied to the support to form the composition.
Luísa Soares de Oliveira, curator of the exhibition, observes that Catarina Pinto Leite's "communicating vessels" "communicate with history; personal history, in the first place, made up of memories of territories, passages, journeys, stories, readings, images, authors; and the collective history of painting and drawing, insofar as, as is the norm in our contemporaneity, they appropriate past genres and works to update them in the present time".
Catarina Pinto Leite began her artistic career in 1990 with a two-year course in Decorative Painting with Professor Joana Valdez, while working as a painting restorer at the Conservation and Restoration Workshop (OCRE). She then studied Drawing and History of Art at the National Society of Fine Arts in Lisbon (1991 and 1994) and Painting at Arte Ilimitada under the guidance of Filipe Rocha da Silva. She was a visual arts teacher for six years at a school in Lisbon and has been exhibiting individually and collectively in various spaces since 1996. Her work is represented in public and private collections.
Find out more about Catarina Pinto Leite's "Communicating Vessels": HERE
More information: +351 214 815 660 | geral@fdl.pt
Organisation: Câmara Municipal de Cascais | Fundação D. Luís I | Bairro dos Museus