Por que razão se toma por um barco?, 1986, by Ana Jotta is our current highlight as the painting is on loan to the exhibition Meia Sombra: a partir da Coleção da CGD, open at Museu do Caramulo, from April 12 to June 22, 2025. This exhibition is part of Desconcentrar a series of activities focused on artistic creation and production in low-density population areas, such as, Caramulo, Idanha-a-Nova, Abrantes and Guarda. To get the series started, curator Sara Castelo Branco has asked artists Joana da Conceição, Maria Paz Aires, and Teresa Arêde to create new works in an artist-in-residence programme.

By using drawing, painting, and sculpture, as well as embroidery and ready-made everyday objects, the artist’s technical dexterity and pictorial virtuosity becomes apparent in the small canvases she has painted throughout her career, since the late 1960s. While she was initially influenced by Dadaist and conceptual influences, her works have moved towards a language of irony that is very much her own. Anchored in a surrealist logic, the painting Por que razão se toma por um barco? reflects on a possible narrative. Under a sky in shades of grey, blue, and pink, three elements populate the composition. On the right, the silhouette of a brown dog and, on the left, a hand making an illusionistic gesture that suggests the head of the animal barking. This play of shadows, between reality and illusion, is punctuated by a small olive branch isolated in the centre of the painting.

In the context of the exhibition Meia Sombra , the painting brings other “unfathomable imaginaries of the earth” (Sara Castelo Branco). Placed in the European painting room of Museu do Caramulo’s permanent collection, the painting highlights nature’s inherent mystery and its healing and enunciative power. The simulation between the image and its reproduction – in this case, between the painting of the dog and the gesture of the hand that replicates it – can reveal the cynicism between the reciprocal rapport between man and nature, where the power of the former dominates the latter, while the opposite may also happen: the exuberant and overwhelming power of nature subdues human fragilities and insecurities.  

Ana Jotta was born in 1946 in Lisbon, where she lives and works. She studied at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes in Lisbon, and later at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre, Brussels. She was awarded the EDP Arte Grand Prize in 2013. In 2005, Museu Serralves organized Rua Ana Jotta, a retrospective exhibition curated by João Fernandes. Few years later, in 2014, Culturgest presented A Conclusão da Precedente, an anthological exhibition curated by Miguel Wandschneider.

Hugo Dinis