In 2010 Magda Delgado discovered Schopenhauer’s text Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [“The World as Will and Representation”], becoming a turning point in the artist’s perception of her own work.
Around this time arose the notion of Beautiful as a hypothesis of consolation for the Human Condition, as well as the rooting of concepts such as the Absolute, Contemplation, Asceticism, Transcendency and Redemption in Delgado’s work.
L'Arcadie après le Malaise dans la Civilisation is a body of work born from “Schopenhauerian” pessimism and developed out of an experience of social isolation, as well as cultural rootlessness after the artist left the city of her birth. This departure allowed Delgado to be aware of the architectural and religious differences of old Swabia. Forests, agriculture, churches and cathedrals became the exclusive links she established with her surrounding environment.
While living in the only Catholic village of this region, she familiarized herself with...the idioms and rituals (full of horror vacui) that bond Latin countries, opposite to the formal austerity of Protestantism. Thus, she began to envision her work as the process of creating personal cult objects in a collecting ritual that could live in an austere church of her adopted village. From the shock of the image of the unadorned and dead Christ, typical of protestant representation, was born the resolution to recreate the old masters’ landscapes of the crucifixion in a depopulated world, without Christ’s death: an Arcadia free of mankind’s disgrace.
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Magda Delgado (b. 1980, Lisbon) lives and works in a forest-surrounded village in the Baden-Württemberg Province, Germany. Studied architecture at FAUTL, Lisbon (1999-2004), graduated in Fine Arts - Painting at the School of Fine Arts of Lisbon (2004-08) and completed a MA in Painting at the same institution (2012). Delgado was a founding member of Tempos de Vista collective (2009) and has been an artist-in-residence at the Observatório Astronómico de Lisboa - Programa de Apoio à Valorização e Divulgação Artísticas by the Gulbenkian Foundation (2011); Residências Coop, Lisbon (2012). Recent exhibitions include “Contemplation Images and the mentor Alberto Caeiro Revival,” Casa Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon; “Lugar (In)Comum,” Residências Coop, Lisbon; “SPECTRUM,” Galeria Antiks Design / Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida, Lisbon; “ZIPBUNG,” Museu de História Natural, Lisbon. Her work is included in the Collections of Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida, Casa Fernando Pessoa and Colecção ECO (Marvão).
Entrada actualizada el el 06 jun de 2018
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