Lost and Found
Underdogs Gallery
Solo Show
Lisbon, 2018

“A small, black-and-white photograph found, by chance, in the street, with the inscription “my grandfather” scribbled on the back, served as a starting point for this second solo exhibition by Pedrita Studio at Underdogs Gallery, replete with mnemonic fortuities and poetic instants. Intentionally intersecting the analogue world and the digital world, the legacy of the past and the reality of the present, the series of panels showcased here resorts to their original composition technique based on the use of discontinued industrial tiles following the principle of the pixel or photographic grain.

 

Inspired by a set of lost (and found) images that capture mundane episodes and various expressions which are certainly familiar to us – from the drollest spontaneity to the most staged of poses –, this meticulous body of work suggests an exercise in contemplation on the ideas of loss and recovery – of our individual memories, of our collective referents, of our cultural and identitarian heritage.

If the authorial gesture that retrieves the original photographs from oblivion is accompanied by a transformative action, reconfiguring them into a new aesthetic format, the act of recovery is equally extended to the medium itself, it too salvaged from nihility and sublimated. The result of this intricate game of regeneration and reinterpretation is materialised here in a kind of open narrative itinerary where each viewer can create, through the potential connections that can be established, or found, between the various elements exhibited, their own stories – assuming that this grandfather and these people could very well be our own relatives and friends.

 

 

These analogue images found by chance around the various places of our daily lives contain details and compositions we appreciate and of which, with no measure of certainty, we can only question and try to guess their circumstances. In this limbo of uncertainty which, to us, seems beautiful, we considered a correspondence with the history of the material we have been using in our artistic practice and we crossed the analogue with the digital refined by hand in order to create a series of new abstract-figurative panels.

This meeting between analogue and digital, between images and tiles that were lost and then found, seemed to intersect in many points with the body of work we have been developing: subject and matter that share premises of origins which, provisionally, are undefined; interesting visual compositions for chromatic and plastic exploration; the stories they can develop into; and the new places they can inhabit until being lost again.