In the work of Bárbara Fonte (Braga, Portugal, 1981), her own body, present as an image or in her drawing’s gestural force, appears full of historical-religious reminiscences. The sacred, the symbolic, the iconographic and the erotic coexist through an instrumental body that, segregated and solitary in settings created in the artist’s studio, lives and documents “intimate performances”.

Strongly aligned with European pictorial tradition, Bárbara Fonte composes her visual lexicon from performative actions filmed in her studio and drawings embodying a “primitive union between body and thought”. Transversal to both practices, the meaning of existence and the subjective potential of the human being are invariable concerns that guide the artist’s work, transmitted through the creation and representation of allegories, symbolism, the theatricalisation of religious iconography, the deconstruction of cinematographic images, the exploration of eroticism, comedic notes and references to European artistic tradition. Between the quotidian and the ritualistic, her work simultaneously questions and reacts to being in the world.

MOSTEIRO DE SANTA CLARA-A-NOVA

Morte de um opositor, 2024

Installation, seven video channels, loop

Courtesy of the artist.

In Morte de um opositor, Bárbara Fonte creates a labyrinth of moving images across five rooms of the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova. The installation builds an imagetic and sonic path through the space, based on the artist’s theatrical performances and the sounds that accompany them. In the small performances — often filmed in her studio — loneliness is a thread that drives her almost always unaccompanied presence on stage. Her surrealist stagings rethink and exaggerate historical representations, bringing together religious experiences, political allegories and erotic gestures.

CAPC CÍRCULO SEDE

Tratamento farmacológico da paranoia, 2015–2023

Set of objects, variable materials and dimensions

Cortesia da artista.

Beer bottlecaps holding a pearl, a bone adorned with false eyelashes, a bullet cartridge decorated with fabricated tears and other enigmatic artefacts form a set of surreal objects. A small collection of oneiric curiosities made by the artist Bárbara Fonte, which arise from her intimate performances. Objects whose existence is based on the absurd, the playful and the aesthetic, but which allude to an autobiographical universe.