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José Roseira
José Roseira is a freelance writer and filmmaker based in Porto. Mafalda Santos is based in New York, having completed an artist’s residency at Location One in SoHo in February. Her work is currently on view in a group show entitled Only Connect at the Bloomberg Headquarters, NY until August 29.
Mafalda Santos, Ambiente de Trabalho, 2005 (detail). Permanent ink on wall, 340 x 500 cm. Courtesy of Plano XXI.Organizational systems, networks, interconnection, and interdependence are heavily evident in Mafalda Santos’ work. From the start of her career, the artist has shifted between works on canvas or paper, and direct interventions in exhibition spaces. The relationships between the different media she chooses and the abstract context of her work serve equally as substrates for toying with the principles of scale and composition.
From the intuitive analysis of the relationships between names to the chronological representations of the processing of information related to the artistic, social, and political arenas she takes part in, a range of processes provide the catalyst for her drawings. The presence of the book and references to the library and the archive are also themes present in her work. They provide the source for her unique iconography of diagrammatic compositional strategies. These simplified images are expressed in the form of the network, which she uses as a way to represent a moment/place in a mental or social structure of interior and exterior relationships.
The network is not substantive in relation to painting. It does not define or locate subjects or objects, nor does it have any cartographical pretension. The paintings reveal the outcome of a moment catalyzed by the artist. They express an instant in time and a discontinuation, a two-dimensional and abstract portrayal of a reality that functions on an indeterminable number of axes.
The space and context of the exhibition for which her works are produced are often a contributing factor in the choice of the moments and/or themes. The invocation of the present (of the moment the work is at and which it represents) therefore emerges as an element that balances the formal structure of the composition, instilling it with an ephemeral nature, where an immediacy of movement is sensed or presaged.
