This anthological exhibition of Sobral Centeno ’s drawings covers a period of roughly sixty years of work, offering its visitors a rare opportunity to become familiar with an impressive and continuous graphic corpus that marks the oeuvre of one of the most unique names in the Portuguese art scene.

Defined by inexhaustible energy and constant experimentation, his drawing work develops as a perfect balance between extensive series — predominantly marked by the repetition and reiteration of a theme, shape or composition — and single, isolated pieces that emerge without lineage, as if spontaneously generated.
Drawing is frequently the less known part of many artists’ work, even though it often, as is the case with Sobral Centeno, runs throughout their oeuvre. It is the ideal means to discipline the hand and exercise the brain, to pass the time and engage the mind, to solve formal or compositional problems. Centeno’s work moves between grace and gravity, irony and earnestness, rapidity and delay. Most of all, it is an endless exercise in recollection and (self-)quotation.
Usually kept behind the scenes but sometimes shown to the public, drawing is, in fact, both the foundation and the operative and experimental field of Sobral Centeno’s oeuvre.

– Nuno Faria, 2024