[open the box] Pedro Sousa Vieira

In the early nineties Pedro Sousa Vieira had a studio in Braga, in a house from the early XX century. All of the rooms were empty of furniture, but the walls were covered with A4 charcoal drawings. In one of the rooms there was a drawing desk, a small space for such work done obsessively from morning to night. Drawing had become an absolute activity carried out like an unending process, done in charcoal on paper, always the same size. He had probably done over thirty thousand drawings, from which three hundred remained after a strict sifting selection. They are thus the result of a distillation, of a process of saturation and purification until they became drawings of drawings, macerated, complex, tortuous, mysterious, physical, metamorphic, fragile and sharpened.

The sheets of paper were drawn on both sides and, as happens to works of art and people, have been getting older. The charcoal has been slowly absorbed by the paper, and slight ghosts from the other side of the page are starting to emerge on the surface, in an entropic process that grants them body and thickness. They are aging well, like the bodies that get to know themselves well over time, maintaining the living memory of the giant task to which they bear witness. They are perhaps the most impressive set in a drawing-centred project carried out over recent years, alongside the work of João Queiroz, Ângelo de Sousa and Jorge Queiroz. But Pedro Sousa Vieira’s drawing have something that make them unique: within the process of drawing itself, they intend to discover what is born when one declines this verb outside of the analysis of its grammatical structure, because they were not produced from an analytical point of view, but from an abandoning of consciousness. This search for a pure gesture of drawing is doomed to failure – and Pedro Sousa Vieira knows this so well that he got rid of ninety percent of his production because, in the final analysis, a critical judgement on the dive that had taken hold of him was needed.

So the drawings that belong to the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos are not only (although they also are) documents of a radical and intimate performance; they are moments from a demonstrative process on how drawing is an activity without outlines, a practice, a continuum, a mantra.

Biography
Pedro Sousa Vieira was born in Oporto in 1963 and graduated in Painting at the Escola Superior e Belas-Artes do Porto (1989). He lives and works in Braga, where he is also a teacher. He has worked in painting, drawing, collage, sculpture and photography. His first solo exhibition was in 1986. Since then he has shown his work in several galleries and museums, highlights being exhibitions at the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (CAM-FCG, Lisbon, 2002), Zoom 1986-2002 – Colecção de arte contemporânea portuguesa da Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento: uma selecção, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Oporto, 2005) and Entre linhas – desenho na colecção da Fundação Luso-Americana, Culturgest (Lisbon, 2005). He is represented in many art collections, among which the CAM-FCG (Lisbon), the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Oporto), the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (Lisbon) and the Centro de Cultura Contemporânea – Cooperativa de Comunicação e Cultura de Torres Vedras.


Bibliography
Obras da Colecção da Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvi- mento (cat.), Lisboa, FLAD/Instituto Português de Museus, 1993.
Desenhos contemporâneos – a partir do infra-mince (cat.), Lisboa, Sociedade Lisboa’94/Livros Horizonte, 1994.