Marco Pires graduated in Visual Arts-Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon in 2001.
Has regularly exhibited since then. Lives and works in Lisbon.
The body of work of Marco Pires, particularly in regard to the field of drawing, is developed in accordance with a dialectic movement of thesis and antithesis, or rather, affirmation and negation. This system stems from the utilizing and re-contextualizing of documents and images the artist collects for later intervention, suspending their scientific attributes and introducing new layers that open the works to new approaches and readings – a dimension from whence error, hesitation and variation emerge. This act of re-contextualizing pre-existing elements can be paralleled to the practice of "détournement", which, before being systematized and studied in the texts of the Situationist International, had appeared decades before with the use of collage, introduced by Picasso at the start of the XXth century and then reused by both Dadaists and Surrealists by mixing text, painting and pictures of all and any provenance in an attempt to subvert the bourgeois aesthetic values of the time. This is of course not Marco Pires’ intention, as historically détournement as a subversive practice has evolved and followed social and artistic trends, fusing with music via punk and the DIY ethos, and ultimately being absorbed by the very capitalist system it aimed to put in question.
More relevant to Marco Pires is the recuperation of a ludic system stemming from the possibility of developing new paradigms based on the connections and associations between the objects and documents that are his point of departure, at once denying them and handing them over, thus creating new reading possibilities.
Solo exhibitions:
2010 X, Y, Z, Galeria Pedro Oliveira, Porto / 2010 Desvio, Paços do Concelho, Torres Vedras / 2009 Works on paper, Galeria João Esteves de Oliveira, Lisbon / 2008 Toporama, Appleton Square, Lisbon / 2007 Displacement Maps, Galeria Pedro Oliveira, Porto / 2007 Rebatimento, Sala Poste-ite, Porto / 2007 White Lies, Caroline Pagès Gallery, Lisbon / 2006 Magnificare, Sala Poste-ite, Porto / 2005 Horizon, Galeria Pedro Oliveira, Porto / 2004 Paisagem Branca, Fuga Pela Escada, Guimarães / 2004 Lustro, Galeria Consigo, Coimbra / 2002 Cell data, Galeria Artfit, Lisbon / 1998 Cisterna da Faculdade de Belas Artes, Lisbon / 1995 Ala Sul do Mosteiro de Alcobaça
Collections
Junta de Extremadura, Spain
PLMJ Foundation, Portugal
Rios collection, Portugal
PCR collection, Portugal
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