Through art history, specifically in the field of painting history, one knows of landscapes, in most of the timeline of that same history, as simple backdrops of a more important event, usually of a political, mythological, or religious nature. In the 19th century, it got a leading role as a genre. Ever since then, landscapes have become the primary subject of many artistic works by aesthetic operators, who explore this subject in many different ways, respecting its formality, inhabiting the fragments that make it up, or exploring the various genres inside that greater genre.

In the works displayed here, we can easily identify a gesture over the landscape that defines it and later dissects it. Given the profitable urbanization process, the displayed works bring the ideas of landscape and nature together, an ancestral notion at risk. And so we arrive at a contemporary bucolic: fragments and traces telling of a greater landscape.

The contemporary art collection of CAPC was built and displayed throughout the 60-year existence of this institution, fundamental for mapping an alternative art history in Portugal.

Daniel Madeira