DEVIATIONS AND MISPLACEMENTS

Collective of Outsider Art

JOÃO FRÓIS

Born in 1949 in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), João Fróis came from an Alentejo family based in Mozambique for three generations. In the former Portuguese colony, where he remained until 2001, he did a little of everything, giving meaning to his nonaligned, dilettante and adventurous personality. Among other activities, he was a military man, a journalist, a basketball coach, live model and a flight attendant for the Mozambique Airlines. During his free time, he drew and painted, taking advantage of the close relationship he maintained in the local bohemian and artistic scene, which included Malangatana and Chichorro.
He currently lives in Ponte de Lima, completely out of the system, in a kind of isolation that allows him to take his days as he likes, free and detached from material questions.
Self-taught, he makes art as a result of a singular unconscious process of self-therapy, not a regular activity of creative expression with the conscious purpose of showing and sharing one’s result.

PEDRO D’OLIVEIRA

Pedro D’Oliveira, born in Anadia in 1971, is a singular plastic artist. Despite having a higher education in art and being represented in multiple private and institutional collections, both in Portugal and abroad, he has always kept himself away from the established art scene.
Mostly figurative, his works refer obsessively to a children’s imaginary marked by the dualism of good and evil, all expressed in a genuinely naïve way, through multiple plastic forms.

JOAQUIM PIRES

Born in 1952, he dedicated four decades of his life to cod fishing, before taking up his time with his unusual artistic creations.
Self-taught, with a naïf style, he recovers material from the trash that transforms into beings or objects of bizarre aspect. In most situations, it is the original forms of the materials that he collects that suggest the idea for each of the sculptures he creates.
In the studio house, in Viana do Castelo, where he lives and works, there is no space left to accommodate all the pieces created, so he uses them as adornment of the whole surrounding area, including the garden and roof of the house.

MONICA FAVERIO

Monica Faverio (b. 1963, Como, Italy) presents herself as a creative of malleable materials. Specialist graduated in the creation and recovery of stained glass, she studied with some of the best known international masters of this area. Amongst many works and projects, she directed the restoration teams of the stained glass windows of the Monastery of Batalha, Monastery of Alcobaça, Belém Palace (Lisbon).
In July 2018, she presented in Cruzes Canhoto the exhibition “Interstellare”, from which you can see here some pieces.
Objects as space ships as jewelry as art. Cosmic alchemies of urban, maritime and rural space, in fluxes of flexible energies.

EME

Eme (Manuela Moreira, n. 1957, Porto) has been exhibiting in the gallery Cruzes Canhoto since 2016, when she began to create small handmade sculptures in papier-mâché. In these figurative modulations, she adds little hardware components and everyday objects to give them expression, under vibrant full-color backgrounds, or creatively paints them with diverse patterns, in many cases of tribal inspiration. These are flat figures that may represent popular characters or less common beings like robots, skeletons, fakirs, tribal, punks or extra-terrestrials. On the reverse side of most of these pieces can be found semi-fiction stories of the humorous type or social criticism, result of the artist’s daily reflective wanderings around the city.

DAMIÃO VIEIRA

Damião Vieira is that type of person who can be considered a worker of the arts – that is, the true artist. Although self-taught, he always had the privilege of depriving closely with the master painters, given his activity as a graphic arts technician linked to the artistic scene. From them he took advantage of the best of the teachings, without having to submit to the dogmatisms of the academy.
The artistic vein he has felt since the day he was born, in 1964, in Gondomar, in the district of Porto, took him to attend the Escola de Artes Decorativas Soares dos Reis, but circumstances of life never allowed him to enter a college.
From that time until today he has never stopped expressing himself plastically, having exhibited in the most diverse places and situations, following various styles and forms of expression. It was only in the recent years, however, that he gave voice to his intuitions and his natural creativity.

CLARA PROBANZA

Born in 1959 in the Basque Country, Clara Probanza began to shape the material of her dreams after a serious illness had transformed her life and forced her to spend most of her time lying on a sofa.
In order to ease the pain she felt, in 2008, in the company of her sister illustrator, she began to forge what they both called “couch art” and to build a small world of extraordinary strange beings.
The fantastic and colorful universe that populated his mind gained, then, form on paper, through drawings that express the infinite possibilities that the world offers us. In them we can find one-armed characters, heads with a thousand eyes or men with bird legs – abysmal but fun beings who give us life lessons, from a couch in the Basque Country.

NICCOLÒ ROSSI

Niccolò Rossi is a young Italian designer and artist. Last of four brothers, he was born in Monza in 1991. He studied arts, first in Milan, then in Bilbao and finally in Oporto, where he currently lives.
He dedicates himself to ceramic sculpture with an unusual approach, rejecting the decorative and the figurative. The pieces he creates are experimental and minimalist, with a strong subversive and political mark.