VOODOO IN MY BLOOD

ALVARENGA MARQUES (Al.Ma.) is a Portuguese artist who was born in Mozambique, where she spent her childhood. 

She comes from a generation of artists that has chosen, facing a saturated visual world, the appropriation and recycling of several images from varied sources, for the last twenty, thirty years. Yet, her inclusion in this group is controversial, since instead of the usual method of unconditional stealing of references, historic quotations and the respective recycling giving rise to a scattering of the meaning, her case has been revealing a restricted idiosyncratic orientation.

That Alma wants us to be enraptured by this childhood world seems to be, in the very act, her aim. Though it clearly shows, at first sight, a good imitation of the compulsory childish trend to write and paint on inappropriate surfaces, the author’s vandalism, only apparently innocent, goes obviously even farther.

In this fluid, transparent and theatrical space, an interaction of mutual influence, either graphic or plastic, reveals itself – between the background pulsation (staging reality) and the overlapped drawings (paradigmatic of the childish imaginary). From this agitation an expressive strength of a nostalgic, metaphysic and a kind of lost time atmosphere appears.