Bread is food, sharing, community, struggle. It is one of the most universal symbols of our history, capable of evoking so much, and at the same time, resulting from the simplest recipe: water, flour, salt, and yeast, as B Fachada reminds us. Padeirinha was one of the songs I sent to Elisabete during the process of constructing this exhibition. From that sharing, many other exchanges of references and engaged conversations about our concerns, frustrations, and expectations emerged.

Elisabete told me the story of the “Papa do Pão” (Bread Eater), more specifically of Vítor Moreira, the baker who, during the Estado Novo period, following Salazar's measures to compensate for the rise in cereal prices and limit imports, found an ingenious solution to reduce the weight of bread without altering its price. By applying a slit along the bread roll, he increased the surface exposed to heat, enhancing the dough’s expansion and thus creating more bread with less weight*.

The conversations extended beyond bread as an object. We talked about Catarina Eufémia, the Portuguese reaper, whose final demand was for bread; about the painter José Dias Coelho; about Elisabete's grandmother, who, even without teeth, enjoyed bread; about the cults and expressions surrounding bread; about peace, (bread), housing, health, and education. We also spoke about the climate, immigration, and what it means to live inside this cultural bubble that, on one hand, protects us from more negative visions, but, on the other hand, exposes us to many vulnerabilities.

Although bread is the central element of this installation—resulting from the artist's recent explorations with this material and its use in sculpture—the true inspiration came from her reflections on hunger: the hunger for art and the artist. On one hand, the visceral need to create and embed oneself in the work itself; on the other, the urgency to understand and question one’s own condition and that of those who have walked similar paths.

Creation thus emerges as a means of denunciation and resistance, materializing in a collective construction, in a dough that expands and transforms. Bread is food, sharing, community, struggle, just like the exhibition Elisabete Gonçalves presents here.

“Carcaça” by Frederico Duarte in the newspaper Público on September 25, 2011.

Créditos das Fotografias: Vasco Vilhena / Cortesia de ZDB

In an act of raising and approaching ritualistic processes and valuing a polyhedral perspective on the world outside of oneself, Elisabete Gonçalves has been developing a work that is expansive and largely undisciplined (outside the disciplinary framework that usually organizes the so-called 'Fine Arts'). The generative energy that fuels her immense production is largely grounded in her experience, in her life, and is crossed by a hyper-sensory perception that is established from the experience of the body. The recovery of ancestral gestures, the discovery of new forms from universal symbols and signs, and the permeability of natural and organic materials mark the vast cosmology of objects she has been producing.

Text by Ana Anacleto

In this show, Elisabete Gonçalves presents fragments of a body in construction. The artist creates from fractured objects and bodies, marking a moment of transition, impact or even death, almost in a ritualistic way.

Rituals are important because they mark a passage, be it from life to death, unconscious to conscious, imaterial to material. Objects are often vehicles of these passages and they symbolize and carry the meanings of that moment, which vanishes in time.

Still in a discovery of the state of these objects, the artist experiments with the resistance of the material in relation with the potency of her creative impulse. The gesture - scribbling, taping, tearing - can be felt in her work and appears as proof that her own body is at the service of the making. It's an energy that transits from her to the body, from body to object, and maybe from there to death - it's a being looking for locus.

We witness the present state of something in development, which finds meaning in these objects and their ensemble - a ritual of this body, in construction through fragments.

Text by Carolina Marques

The exhibition Inside Out is the first public presentation of Elisabete Gonçalves' work, where the artist shows a group of paintings and sculptures based on found objects, impressions of light and colors, which carry a strong sense of self discovery. The artist seeks inspiration in her surroundings and, in her work, expresses what has long been looking for a fit.

In these pieces, we can find vibrant colors, developed by the artist, and characters that have become projections of her subjectivity. Elisabete Gonçalves presents an alternative story, and we're invited into a parallel reality. In her search for another mold, a different fit for what she is confronted with, the artist takes concrete objects and measurements and gives them alternative and artificial values. She creates prosthesis for cut paths, stories for irreparable fractures, and covers in paint what is locked in its form.

The gallery's Espaço Quadrado is also transformed to hold this reverse of reality, where the works become alive, and becomes the literal matrix of the molds the artist makes as the starting point of her creation.

Elisabete Gonçalves reminds us that art is, par excellence, a vehicle of discovery and an exercise of freedom that allows us a search for meaning with other levels of gravity, other perceptions of time and space, other characters.

Text by Carolina Marques