The plastic artist Trindade Vieira presents in this exposition, a new feature from the many creative possibilities that his work can have. For those who have followed his exhibitions through all the years, the main theme of the plastic production remains. However, from exposition to exposition, the artist always tries to explore the expressive possibility of another setting. From the painting installation to the most subversive artist expressions or to the social-political intervention such as the fanzine, now stands the time for the Till. That choice doesn’t seem random at all, if we take into consideration the importance that the till has in Portugal, for more than five centuries, as a privileged support for the artistic expression. In fact, for a more attentive observer, the till has been reflecting the Portuguese imaginary repertoire, from the most traditional to the most erudite, as well as the predilection by the realistic description and the attraction of the cultural exchanges. Therefore, is no wonder that many artists have chosen to use this support as a vehicle of their artist expression. Trindade Vieira it’s not, in this context, an exception. At this present performance, this support confers the new expressive and narrative possibilities of his work continuum.
Can it be said, subsequently, that the artistic production of Trindade Vieira drains in the recurrence of themes and narratives shown along his career? I really don’t believe, and such interrogation just makes sense when we don’t try to understand his creative exercise as a work of constant changing. The till presents, plastically, possibilities that so far it hasn’t been seen in this artist work. One can infer from the showing images a hedonist side of his creation, not pretending to get to a specific point. It pretends, instead to explore all the possibilities and potentialities of the materials in a ludic-expressive continuity, from which the work of Trindade Vieira can be understood.
But another element is taken again in this exposition, an element that through the years has been in constant dilution, and now takes on the strength and the symbolic meaning never in such evidence before: the body. A designed body almost furrowed in the support. A body that blends with the narrative elements represented. Bodies that mix in landscapes and integrates in private banana plantations. Who knows if can’t be conceded, this way, the initial signals of a narrative that the spectator is invited to bring down without any obligation of finding an end for the described or imagined vicissitude.
Which bodies are these, proposed by Trindade Vieira? Is this a retake of a symbolic approach, a sexuality that lives implied in the representation of the bodies and in the symbolic transverse element to all of the artist works: the banana tree? From another point, the dash aggressivity in the shapes representation can lead us to an abrupt strangeness of pleasure, who knows, an aggressive hedonism of our times? Here, the body can also be conceived as an object without transcendence, maybe a pure carnal map of an identity that can, at the limit, integrate all the appearance.
For all that has been said, the work of Trindade Vieira can be understood as a continuity of a creation in constant change, in a communication that is established from exposition to exposition, and that in each one, a new element is left for a linear reading of his art, because each narrative element is born in the grossness of the histories and of all mysteries that his symbols can comprehend: it’s a linearity that roots not in the ephemeral or in the anecdotic, but in the most outlying origins of every human being, maybe in its cultural and civilizational truth.
“Entre uma Visão e um Sentimento” can have, all an universe of readings, symbols and consigns that can be understood in the domain of the artist universe, but also in the private sphere of the individual imaginary. It’s tried to blend material plasticity, exploring its expressive capacities with a universe that is fulfilled more and more with elements that grant its narrative. With the island always as background.

Sérgio Benedito