Without Shame
The objects, those mysterious suits of armorunder which desire, nocturnal and nude, awaits us. Ghérasim LucaRodin was fascinated in making erotic drawings, which many people considered obscene, provoking a scandal among critics and the press of his time, even though the master considered them...

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Where is libido headed?
Some people still think drawing is just a preparatory stage for something else. Worse even: there are those who think drawing means line. Does it get any worse? It does indeed. There are also people for whom artworks may be classified by their "support": paper, fabric, metal, marble and so forth,...

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Visual rationality and meaning
Antonio Dias is an artist whose precise visual logic, both abstract and concrete, is conceived within didactic or poetic categories of thought, and whose works, though they project themselves as self-contained systems of exclusive aesthetic remoteness and almost canonical immanence, nevertheless...

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Tradition as invention

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The river and the craft
"It is not difficult to make things; what is difficult is to put ourselves in the proper condition to make them." Constantin Brâncusi The river and the craft The work Ausländer (Foreigner, 1993) by Antonio Dias is a "carranca", a wooden sculpture on the bows of boats which sail the São...

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The multiplication of spaces
I met Antonio Dias ten years ago. At that time we were, he as an artist and I as a critic, both involved in clarifying the artistic phenomenon called conceptual art. Antonio would, for instance, put up paintings containing an enigmatic word: the statement, pattern, etc.Afterwards I lost sight of...

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Stratification
“Criticism is a delayed, statistical act, and in so being, it is for the most part inert in the face of the piercing events in poetry…” (Emilio Villa, 1959) To look today for a train of thought regarding the work of Antonio Dias may mean stumbling, right from the start, with the...

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