5 years 5 walls

The idea, a flash, a sparkle that illuminated our restless and curious spirit. That brief moment when we touched the sky, when we felt like gods of an immaterial reality, where for an instant we are everything and the next instant we are nothing. It was the ephemeral nature of the constructions of thought that gave way to our enthusiasm, to the energy that materialized, as a group, between nonsense and common sense, between fantasy and caution, between extravagance and sobriety, on a broad path, without divisions, made of freedom and joy, among friends, all different, but all sensitive to the world, profound and resistant in our approach to a daily life that pushes us towards superficiality and conformism, towards indifference and immobility. Ainori was born in this context, as a space of freedom, seeking to give rise to one, in fact, several critical visions of the world, on the representation and interpretation of the good and the beautiful, of reality and metaphysics, of logic and the absurd, promoting and disseminating the work of young artists within a curatorial line embodied by an idea of irony.

This is how Ainori continues to be today.

And we have realized that it has been around for five years. We feel that it was, and is, just a moment, a moment that remains, a privilege. A privilege that we must celebrate and that we celebrate by bringing five works by five iconic artists from the history of Ainori to the five walls of our gallery: Cristiano Mangovo, Edgar Plans, John Trashkovsky, Paula López-Bravo, and Tiago Evangelista.

Artists are the essence of an art gallery. We view artistic representation, the work of art, as the supreme form of expression of free and individual will, which is also the pure expression of an idea and which materializes as art in an uncomplicated interpretation and perception of that same idea.

This exhibition transports us to key moments in our history. It aims to show the journey of the gallery, which was built with freedom and a critical spirit, with intellectual honesty, respect for curators and artists, for art and the public, respect for ourselves, for our sensibilities, our differences, our way of being in a common space where we embrace aesthetic contemplation as one of the ways of intuiting the essence of the world.

João Gavinhos