Galeria Nuno Centeno presents, for the first time, Jorge Feijão (b. 1971, Sarcelles, France). His solo exhibition, Book of Hours, shows a series of thirty-six drawings that compose a total of four large-scale panels.
Jorge Feijão has a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from ESAD.CR and taught at this school between 2003 and 2006. He lives and works in Caldas da Rainha. His first solo exhibition was in 2004 at Sala do Veado, Museu Nacional de História Natural, Lisbon. Other solo exhibitions regularly followed, including Mundus, mundi, CIAJG – Gabinete de Desenho, Guimarães, 2018; more recently, in 2020, Cadernos A&B – prelúdio e fuga, Casa-Museu Guerra Junqueiro | Porto. He has participated regularly in group exhibitions since 1991, including Sister Spaces, ZDB, Lisbon and Southern Exposure, San Francisco, in 2000; Armaposta, Galeria Trem, Faro/National Capital of Culture, 2005; Fazer Falar o Desenho, Funchal Museum of Contemporary Art, Madeira, 2007; Processo e Transfiguração, Casa da Cerca, Almada, 2010; Oracular Spectacular/Desenho e Animismo, CIAJG, Guimarães, 2015; the most recent, O sentido da vida é só cantar: orfismos, urdiduras, sortilégios, lances de dados, zet gallery, 2023.
Selected for the Prémio Celpa/Vieira da Silva – Arpad Szenes Artes Plásticas Revelação, and for the Prémio EDP Novos Artistas, in 2005; won the Prémio Internacional Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso/Aquisição Taminvest SGPS, 2007. Represented in the following collections: Fundação EDP; Fundação Carmona e Costa; Fundação Ilídio Pinho; Fundação PLMJ; AIP (Associação Industrial Portuguesa); Fundação D. Luís I; Centro Cultural Raiano; Coleção Figueiredo Ribeiro; Coleção Isabel e Carlos; Coleção Municipal das Caldas Rainha.

‘A Cosmogony in Drawing‘
by Nuno Faria

A broad and complex body of work that romantically aspires to the totality of the world, to all things, noble or poor, sublime or dirty, flying or crawling. A body of work that tragically dreams of reconstituting the world as it was on the first day of Genesis by joining together the most plural portions. An astonishing cosmogony in drawing – in the sense that it reconstructs man’s astonishment at the strangeness of Gaia and all her species, animals, plants, and minerals; and, in the same vein, a work that sheds light on the emergence of drawing in humanity’s infancy – how drawing brought in clairvoyance to the world at a time when, verisimilarly, things and beings could not be distinguished from one another: man from animal, child from adult, things did not yet have names.
Book of Hours is Jorge Feijão’s largest polyptych installation to date. It brings together four of the seven polyptychs that make up the large installation project The Grand Machine of the World – Seven dark chants, developed since 2020, with occasional breaks in which he dedicated himself to creating series of smaller drawings and paintings. To these, is added a video performance, filmed in sequence, with the title of the same name, whose presence haunts (blackens) the space-time of the exhibition.
It is an installation that is part of the tradition of medieval religious painting, presenting itself as an altarpiece, bringing together images from different sources on a backdrop that weaves together a narrative (the fabric of the world). In this sense, it resembles a proto-museological structure where it would be possible to access a large number of graphic representations arranged on the walls of a closed room – a sort of drawing cabinet, an atlas of images: Mundus, Mundi. A piece situated between irreconcilable scales such as the universe, the globe, the sky, the inhabited world, and that of ornament, embellishment, arrangement, or cosmetics, in resonance (check Derrida) with Cosmos, the world of the Ancient Greeks.
In the form of a perpetual drawing, it is the paradoxical materialization of a utopia, of a drawing without beginning or end, in continuous expansion and metamorphosis. With these artworks, Jorge Feijão continues his research/explanation of the great universal mythological themes: the creation of the universe, of the world, and of humanity and its epic and tragic passage on Earth.
Drawing is a discipline without a master in which the artist learns to make his own choices, create his own constellations, and invent his own individual cosmogonies and mythologies.
Silent and solitary, the path of the shadow and the gap, a work in darkness.

June 2024