Jorge Feijão, Galeria Nuno Centeno’s represented artist, shows one of his most recent works titled O Sonho de György at Hotel Tivoli Avenida Liberdade, in Lisbon, Portugal. This site-specific artwork was developed as part of Tivoli Art Collection - Make Room for Masterpieces, a programming dedicated to contemporary art, first launched in 2011 and resumed in 2022. This large-scale artwork, measuring a total of 8 by 3 meters, occupies the hotel’s lobby, where it will be featured until the end of November.
Jorge states that the inspiration for this piece came to him after a dream, where three severe-looking entities that he later perceived as archangels were featured - '…each of them had a different function and was conveying a message of urgency and protection'. Initially, he aimed at creating three pieces; however, the scheduling didn’t allow him to do so.
Produced entirely with the use of charcoal and soft pastels over 352 A4 paper sheets, both new and recycled (a common technique in the artist's process), O Sonho de György is a representation of Pietro Perugino’s Archangel Michael, a Renaissance painting, an element of the Polyptych of Certosa di Pavia. The final image aims to respond to the ‘imperative need to react to the tragic spectacle of the accelerated collapse of the planet’.
In the original painting, Archangel Michael symbolizes a victory of good over evil, a representation used across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Feijão makes use of this aspect in hopes of conveying a turnaround for environmental anxiety, wars, and extremism proliferating across the globe at the moment.
Hotel Tivoli Avenida Liberdade Lisboa
Av. da Liberdade 185, 1269-050
Lisbon, Portugal