ZDB asserts itself in the production of individual projects based on specific curatorial processes, enhancing the meaning of the exhibition contexts resulting from these ventures, privileging different content and creative processes, encouraging research, and providing means of production.

The current exhibition is based on the assumption that creation takes place alongside curatorship.

Having been developed from his residences in ZDB, it intends to promote the crossing and dialogue between a series of works by Gonçalo Pena together with symbolic artifacts from various public and private collections.

The pulsational universe, the revolted nature is for Gonçalo Pena the absolutely fundamental place as the origin, or poetic ‘motum’, as it fights for the possibility of revolutionary effectiveness of art, today, now.

The project intends to make its process visible by linking the manipulation of symbolic files; the recovery of narratives; pictorial hierophany; filmic heterophagy and the scene simulation laboratory.

Gonçalo Pena’s work has its origins in the phenomenon of painting, developing mostly in this medium. The author understands visual and plastic representation, as a defining activity of the human as a species. However, this was not done, during the whole process of developing his work, without a permanent critical screening motivated by the suspicion of technical obsolescence, and therefore political, of the pictorial.

The modern historical framework fitted, not without violence and abuse, the readings of pictorial artifacts in a line parallel to the socio-economic, technological, civilizational evolution, seen and dynamized by powerful ideological catalysts as was, for example, Marxism. In view of the actual and current dispersion of paths and visions under which he was formed, as a producer; before the promise of freedom, which generates bodily and extra-linguistic possibilities in painting, the author found himself as a painter at a crossroads; If, on the one hand, his ideological formation academically provided him with all the conceptual tools to criticize magic, it is on the other hand, initially, that these obscure places remain as unavoidable portals and paths for the exploration of obscure matter, empty spaces, monsters that reason’s sleep makes emerge.

The truth is that, never so much, as at present, the formative rarefaction of individuals and, consequently, of the social body, destroys the institutional foundations of the various orders of discourse. Sexual, “magical”, passionate disorders, as they are named, ordered, policed ​​and eventually banished, become in their essential irreducibility, through the loss of effectiveness of the ideological webs of the device, threats or vehicles of revolutionary potential, depending on the side of the barricade from which this deaf conflict is expected.