Alexandre Madureira

These paintings are from Alexandre Madureira's series called The Imaginary Museum.

The Imaginary Museum is a project that aims to reconstruct and reinterpret masterpieces. The artist, as a barthesian bricoleur, creates a "collage" painting projected on canvas the current popular belief: a juxtaposition of images from the universe of tradition, of art history, popular culture and mass communication. In this way, these figures become icons in return and end up being a product of historically contingent for entering in the timeless dimension of memory.
What is a museum? If not an institution that has a role in identifying and presenting candidate images to enter the "eternal" Olympus?Through the power of selection, the museum not only preserves but also is actively involved in the creation (or invention) of memory.
Each painting from the Imaginary Museum follows the narrative line of the work inspired, but it rewrites it using a new vocabulary and a new syntax. The artist re appropriates the collective myths, putting them in a semantic updated universe giving them back their symbolic value, its strength universally representative.
A reflection about the imaginary formation mechanisms comes together, thereafter the question about the role of mythopoeic painting in the contemporary.(Sara Frau)

+Alexandre Madureira