Joga o Jogo: Largada... at the Fórum Arte Braga

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DATE

22 Dec 2025

AUTHOR

Mafalda Teixeira

Joga o Jogo: Largada... at the Fórum Arte Braga

AUTHOR

Mafalda Teixeira

Following the presentation of PARTIDA... at MU.SA – Museu das Artes de Sintra, the first event in the Joga o Jogo cycle, curated by Hugo Dinis and promoted by the Portuguese Network of Contemporary Art, LARGADA... is now presented at the Fórum Arte Braga. This exhibition brings together works from the Caixa Geral de Depósitos Collection, the Museu dos Biscainhos and the Museu D. Diogo de Sousa (located in Braga), as well as the participation of the guest artist Miguel Soares (1970).

It is in the anteroom of the exhibition space at the Braga Art Forum that the preparatory introduction to the play with the works of Luisa Correia Pereira (1945) and Dayana Lucas (1987) is established. The understanding of the play that the pictorial form embodies, as a (re)discovery of a childhood that is (re)invented, introduces us to the exhibition with the five pieces from 1973 by Luisa Correia Pereira. Suggesting a dynamic and choreographic reading, the linocuts – playful in their conception and assembly – whose titles vary in color, were conceived from 3 white elements on solid-colored backgrounds – blue, red, green, yellow, and black – as if evoking magic carpets with fringes.

The manifestation of transformative states and reinvention continues in the form of metaphor and enigma in Dayana Lucas's sculptural work 7 Chaves (2020). Alluding to ritual and the possibilities of change, the piece, of sculptural and installation dimensions, reveals a gestural and physical action on the part of the artist. Visually rich, we observe the apparent simplicity of the elegant black line design, the curves produced in iron, and the symbolism of the key as a sign associated with the dual role of opening and closing. Symbols of mysteries to penetrate, enigmas to solve, and stages leading to enlightenment and discovery, Dayana threw her own keys into the river in 2013, before crossing it, as an offering, in a process of closing a personal cycle. In 2020, in a gesture of recognition and complicity, she produced the work she now presents to us with a local blacksmith on her ancestral island, a transformative game between memory, imagination, and new beginnings.

From the playful and ritualistic perspective of the works on display in the anteroom, we move to the first room of the exhibition where the game dice are – metaphorically and literally – thrown onto the table. In a successful encounter between historical heritage and contemporary curatorial proposals, we encounter pieces belonging to the collections of the D. Diogo de Sousa Museum and the Biscainhos Museum, in an interesting dialogue between heritage assets and contemporary works. In this regard, we highlight the presence of game pieces from the Roman period originating from archaeological excavations: a ceramic game token (1st century CE - 1st century AD) and a die made of organic wood and bone (3rd century CE - 4th century AD) that demonstrate the importance of board games in the daily life of Roman society and in cultural formation since Antiquity. Next to the Mesa de Jogo (n.d.) from the Biscainhos Museum, made of wood veneered with “Goncalves Alves” and covered in green cloth, it testifies to the appreciation of social interaction through the practice of games such as backgammon, cards, chess or checkers.

In a humorous and ironic dialogue, we observe, not far away, the Thonnet chair whose legs have been cut off and now rest directly on the floor, its top supporting an enormous plaster parallelepiped, as if it were a giant table. In this sculpture by Croft (1957), Untitled (1995), there is a play of ironies, metaphors, and strangeness, as if the chair were sinking into the floor itself due to the excessive weight of the monolith, in a constant confrontation of imbalances, scales, and gravity.

Within the same core of the aforementioned works, we highlight the two oil paintings on canvas by José Loureiro (1961), Palavras Cruzadas VII e IX (1994), whose shades of brown, ochre, and gray, and the dragging of the paint, extend across the grid motif, so dear to the artist, in an expansion of the game of filled and empty squares typical of crossword puzzles. The grid surface of Croft's paintings seems to extend to the work Sem título (1989) by Júlia Ventura (1952), whose multiplicity of images – figurative and abstract – form a panel. In this work, appropriated from modernist works, the openness to color and the intervention in cibachrome superimpose a set of bright and symbolic chromatic speculations onto the structural element of the artist's photographic self-image. Performing for the camera in a somewhat kitsch, seductive, and naive posture, the artist assumes feminine gestures while holding a rose, a symbol of feminine virtue and an instrument for reclaiming a space of desire and carnal pleasure. Images returned to the viewer, like mirrors, address issues related to the representation of female sensuality and/or sexuality.

Reflections on the role of women, their social status, and gender issues are also present in Ana Vidigal's (1960) Woman’s work is never done (2002). Ironically, the series presents household materials repurposed by the artist – wool, artificial flowers, labels, cardboard, plastic gloves – combined with phrases that function as cathartic expressions, all presenting the house as a central element, in a dichotomous game for the observer between public and private. The viewer is once again invited to a new game, like a word search, in the two acrylic on canvas works by João Vieira (1934-2009). Dated 1969, the works reveal the artist's appreciation of gesture, who, through the use of brushes, marks the letters themselves, which gain thickness and presence as a body. In both works, the letter is a sign and the plastic element that organizes the composition, adopting rotations and inversions, enabling a wide combinatorial range of readings, apprehending the letter and the word as something that reacts with us.

Still in the first room dedicated to the exhibition, highlights include four works by the guest artist Miguel Soares, one of the most important voices in digital art of his generation. The digital print Fighter (2003), composed of the juxtaposition of thousands of small images and logos from the internet, depicts in its entirety the launching of a bomb by a fighter jet; in another space in the room, on two televisions placed on black plinths, we observe the video animation works Space Junk Beta I.0 (2001) and H2O (2004), in which he explores themes of the contemporary world: the increase in pollution in the skies and seas. The artist's interest in science fiction, artificial environments, and postmodern technology takes on new contours in his artistic practice today, as evidenced by his most recent work Arquivo Braga (2025), an AI animation work based on archival images of Braga.

From the luminosity of the first exhibition room, we move to the second exhibition space, where in a corner we encounter Jotas (c.1985-2005) by Ana Jotta (1946). Playing on her own surname, the letter j or jota in Portuguese, the artist gathers and molds a heterogeneous set of sculptures whose curved form approximates this letter. Placed on the floor, leaning against the wall, or fixed to it, we observe the collection of sculptures of diverse sizes and materials, from someone who adopted this sign as an iconographic mark and a game of identity. This game of identity seems to continue in the work of Francisco Tropa (1968), A Assembleia de Euclides (cabeça) (2004), a bronze skull presented in a box of compacted sand, in which the head is believed to have been molded, but whose true owner is unknown.

Mortality and introspection connect the works in this space, as evidenced by the tragicomic characters of Suzanne Themlitz (1968) in her Galeria dos solitários, carrancudos e ensimesmados (1997-2001), composed of small, angry, and astonished beings whose expressions seem to affirm their distrust of others and the world, similar to the set of graphite self-portraits on paper, A última morada (1994) by Gaëtan (1944-2019). In an ironic exercise of recognition that both works lead us to, we conclude our visit to the STARTING POINT... which will be followed in 2026, at the Águeda Arts Centre, by ESCAPE! the final moment of the Joga o Jogo cycle.

The exhibition is open until January 4, 2026,

BIOGRAPHY

Mafalda Teixeira, Master’s Degree in History of Art, Heritage and Visual Culture from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto. She has an internship and worked in the Temporary Exhibitions department of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. During the master’s degree, she did a curricular internship in production at the Municipal Gallery of Oporto. Currently, she is devoted to research in the History of Modern and Contemporary Art, and publishes scientific articles.

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