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One more year I have participated at the congress ‘Criadores Sobre outras Obras’ (CSO) (i.e. Creators about other artworks) celebrated at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon, Portugal.
It is always a pleasure to be part of an event of this nature, in which research during the process of creation is the main protagonist. Considering my proposal was technological last year, through the wereables of the artist María Castellanos Vicente; this year, I could show the artwork of Marcos Covelo and his passion about rediscovering Painting in the expanded field.
Marcos Covelo (Vigo, Spain -1985) is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting young painters from Galicia and he has one of the careers with more national and international projection within his generation. Marcos graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona (Spain) in 2010, after having enjoyed an Erasmus Scholarship at the School of Art&Design at Coventry University in the UK in 2007, and a Seneca Scholarship at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Vigo (Spain) before his graduation. In order to complete his training, he studied the University Master in Contemporary art, creation and research at the latter university during the academic year 2010-2011. In this academic context, besides the fact of meeting each other, conversations about artistic interests of all kinds emerged and, in particular, on Painting in the expanded field. The creation environment provided by the Faculty of Fine Arts of Pontevedra (UVigo) propitiated dialogues of this nature, since the assigned studios were very close, which made it easier to exchange views among the different ‘labs’.
The title of my paper, Painting with without paint, is the same that defines his project presented at the Biennial of the Cerveira Foundation in Portugal in 2014 on the occasion of his artistic residence and at the same time, it stresses his interest in investigating once and again the limits of contemporary painting. In fact, this is the main leitmotif of his creation since 2011 when he gives substance to his Final Master’s Thesis entitled Cambio (i.e. Change) at the RAC Foundation with the help of the artists Nono Bandera and Almudena Fernández Fariña. The latter is in fact the author of the doctoral thesis ‘What is not painting (lo que la pintura no es). The logic of denial as an affirmation of the expanded field of Painting’. So, it is a good example of how a doctoral thesis can be a source of motivation applicable to the artistic practise.
The full article can be read in the issue number 14 (April – June of 2016) of the Estúdio research magazine.
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Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.
From the 17th to the 23rd of March, 2016.
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Photos: Marcos Covelo and Marta Bran.