Seven Artists Times Seven Years of Cruzes Canhoto

CLARA PROBANZA

Born in 1959, in the Basque Country, Clara Probanza Arrizabalaga began to shape the material of her dreams, after the emergence of a serious illness that transformed her life and forced her to spend most of her time lying in bed or on a couch.
In order to ease the pain she felt, in 2008, in the company of her sister, a well-known illustrator, she started to build a small world of extraordinary three-dimensional beings made of cotton fabric, forging what they both called “couch art”. Subsequently, the fantastic and colorful universe that populated her mind passed to paper, through drawings where she expressed the infinite possibilities that the world has to offer.
Discovered by Cruzes Canhoto in 2017, she becomes part of all the collective shows held by the gallery from then on. In December 2020, she presents her first solo exhibition at Cruzes Canhoto, entitled “Azal Berritzea” (skin renewal, in Basque).
The characters with multiple heads but one arm, the animals with a thousand eyes and the women with bird’s paws, initially drawn with some naïvité, remain in these new drawings, only that they now appear in more detail and with a more precise line, integrated in a complex web of new patterns and diverse figurations. They’re abysmal but charming beings that give us lessons for the times that are going on, from a couch in the Basque Country.

IDALÉCIO

Idalécio (b.1952) is a portuguese self-taught artist from a small village in Aveiro district.
He started creating spontaneously in the country house where he grew up as an orphan, having no artistic pretensions or interest in revealing the collection he has been accumulating throughout his entire life.
In April 2016, after multiple encounters and conversations, the exhibition “D’Idalécio… Todos Temos Um Pouco” opened at last at the gallery Cruzes Canhoto, in Porto, and his outsider sculptures and paintings could be shown in public for the first time. Still, despite having sold more than 300 art pieces during this operation, Idalécio intended to remain anonymous and continued in the factory where he has always worked, creating only in his spare time. It was not until September 2017, at his second exhibition in Cruzes Canhoto, “Metalúrgico Sexagenário”, that he agreed to reveal himself to the public and to the press.
Pop and populist, surreal and tropicalist, Idalécio is so strongly inspired by the Portuguese folk art as is by some of the expressions of African tribal art, of which he is also a collector. His presence in the interior of Mozambique in the late 1970s serving during the war could be at the basis of this artistic influence.
If at the beginning of his creative activity some stylistic inconsistencies are evident, in the more recent production is perceived a greater cohesion of styles, forms and themes, the result of a successful evolutionary process towards a unique and personal language, as
we could perceive in his most recent exhibition, “Saints, Devils and Other Beasts” (Cruzes Canhoto, 2020), where Idalécio, having nothing else to prove, refused to show any kind of exhibitionism, reducing shapes and colors to the essential, often monochromatic.

ISAAC

He was born in Porto, in 1975, but says he was only really born at the age of six, standing at the entrance to his father’s grocery store, looking at the huge granite wall of the former Cadeia da Relação (Jail and Court of Appeal of Porto) – the first memory he has of himself. He was raised in the Cordoaria area by his grandmother, who sold fish and pots of basil, and by his grandfather who did “street business” before devoting himself to obsessive reading of the Bible.
As a young man, he wanted to be a pastry chef, but ended up working in a pharmacy. In addition, in a daily struggle for survival, he assembled computers, reproduced technical architectural projects and worked as a driver in a moving company. In fact, it was art he liked best, but life never smiled on him, so he postponed his dream of one day becoming an artist and leaving his mark on the world. In recent years, he has been working in companies in the graphic design area, taking the opportunity to develop his innate artistic skills. By mere chance, his activity led him to have to cross regularly with Porto’s art district, and he is now one of the biggest bets of the Cruzes Canhoto gallery.

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 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 mental therapy, especially when life doesn’t suit him, never having shown great interest in projecting himself as an artist.
In April 2017, Cruzes Canhoto exhibited a retrospective of the artist, entitled “Psico-afroliberdelia”, composed of 60 drawings that resulted from an unconscious process of self-therapy over a decade (2003-2014).

MARTINHO

Born in the Ribatejo region, but living in Ovar for a long time, Martinho (b. 1970, João Pedro Coutinho) chose to graduate in design.
Restless and misaligned by nature, he soon found comfort for his mental unquietness through his artistic expression. However, he does not create for the artistic milieu or in search of fame. Nor does he take himself too seriously in his occupation. He makes art like catharsis, creating in a compulsive and visceral way. This is noticeable in his entire work, although not in an obvious way, both in paintings and in sculptural objects.
His collages and assemblages, apparently chaotic and abstract, actually present narratives that report situations of his tormented daily life. It turns out that this daily life is not exclusive to Martinho. It’s common to many of us, and that’s what makes his work so strangely attractive, impressive and empathetic.
After a first solo exhibition, in 2018, at the Ovar Art Center, he presented “Sem Juízos”, at the gallery Cruzes Canhoto, in Porto, in March 2020.

MIGUEL PIPA

Miguel Pipa was born in 1980 in Caxinas, the peculiar fishermen’s neighborhood of Vila do Conde.
Without an academic education by choice, he has always shown a permanent concern with the outside world that surrounds him and a constant curiosity for what is behind things.
For him, nothing is acquired. Everything that comes to hand is questioned, dismantled and reprocessed. That’s how he started experimenting in the field of electronic music, investigating new sonic possibilities that classical instruments could offer when manipulated in an alternative way, or creating new instruments himself from the most common objects of everyday life.
Over the last decade, following the principles of ecotropism, he has been creating, through drawing, a world of interconnected mutant microorganisms that he calls fictional botany.
He presented his work to the public for the first time, in September 2021, at the Cruzes Canhoto gallery (Porto), in the exhibition “Microecotropias”.

SÁTRAPA

Sátrapa emerged at the end of 2013 as an alter ego of artistic expression in agitp(r)op mode. What started out as an exercise of alienation, fiction and fantasy, quickly evolved into something larger to an unusual level of creation in painting and sculpture.
For those unaware of Sátrapa’s creative process, it is difficult to believe that all his works are the result of actions driven by intuition, where nothing is outlined or preconceived. These are creations of the moment, on impulse, and only later refined and finished with a rigorous elaboration typical of a master.
In April 2018, Cruzes Canhoto exhibited a retrospective of the artist’s work at the exhibition “Factoría de Androides”, where one could appreciate not only his famous robotic sculptures but also the paintings that were at their base, still very close to simplistic forms of street art. The success was such, that it was necessary to organize a second part of that show, in the same year: “Factoría de Androides II: Marte Contra-Ataca”. In September 2019, still at Cruzes Canhoto, the exhibition “Mutantes” is presented, exclusively with paintings.
In his evolution, together with the aesthetic refinement, we perceive a greater concern with the denunciation of the brutal changes that society has been undergoing in recent years, especially in his new painting works, where the portrait forms with unconventional faces and bodies acquire a truly impressive depth of character and psychological density.