Tim Madeira for the Jiu Xian Garden Village project in China
"From wooden posts for constructing a new museum and recycled materials, my work emerged, linked to nature and the immense respect that the place and project demanded."
Tim Madeira
Multidisciplinary Artist
"I have a small grove in distant lands of the East..."
**For immense respect …**
…for the dream of a man and a woman who allowed others to dream as well.
To Iiwi, my flower who still doesn’t believe that I didn’t have a project.
To Sissi, with her enigmatic smile that is so captivating.
To Lizzie, with her writing that continues to accompany me through past and future memories yet to come.
To Wang, who translated an entire project and 26 character dedications.
To Jason Chen, with respect.
To Tatoo, so green and so distant…
To Duma, an unusual delight in moments of nostalgia.
To Marta, so many photographs in early projects.
To Gonçalo, the mentor of this project… how wonderful it is to dream and make this reality so much better.
To Artur, the practical man who believes in dreamers.
To Nicolas, the enigmatic madman.
To Fonze, even madder and exceptional.
To Denis, the man from a world we would all like to know.
To Daughan, and to my girls, where everything has always been framed by the palette of traditional Chinese writing, which accompanies and will continue to accompany me, so I do not forget, in my home, so far and so close to our art.
To the taxi drivers… Thank you for the music I just heard.
To the mountain walk… what I dreamed on that day of trust, where I understood the verticality and ecstasy of this natural heritage.
To the House of Red Lanterns… where dreams were made every day and where I also dreamed and painted in an improvised studio where the floor already belonged to my paintings.
To the restaurant and to my friend whose name I do not remember, but which is not important, where I ate, lived, and met him, and whom I hope to see again one day, in memory of so many moments we shared, by the embers that always awaited me in the late afternoon.
To the classes and the kids, to recycling, and to the strong emotions of memories from Africa.
To Sara, with her intense spirituality.
To Rui, my friend… with that extraordinary view towards infinity.
To Filipa, with her uncontrolled sensitivity, with whom I felt such a connection and….. dance.
To Marina, with all her charm and mastery as a great northern woman.
To Vasco, whose work was not built but found its cozy niche among the rocks.
To Michel… the person I understood best with his three faces pierced with color and with whom a lunch happened where chopsticks were his brushes, and all of us from the hard and lasting group where work and friendship occurred.
Tea House… to the path I walked every day, respecting the natural course of animals that was also created for humans by skilled hands, and that took me daily to an extraordinary place of experiences and sensations.
Museum… inverted covering that my carpenter friends executed, while always helping me when needed, and I will never forget the smile of this friendship.
Artist’s Residence… the uniforms where modernism and tradition of a people who cannot stop intersected.
The Medicinal Garden… full of centuries-old sensations and aromas. To the women who made it, who planted it, and who helped me so much, where men are just craftsmen.
"8 Posts in My Garden"
From wooden posts for constructing a new museum and recycled materials, my work emerged, linked to nature and the immense respect that the place and project demanded.
**Fragments** – These began a process that turned into a project which, to my great surprise, made me recall extraordinary moments on a distant island in Mozambique where I felt the world is small and fragile.
**Iron** – A strip of white limestone on an immense black rock, with the metallic remnants of some metalwork as the backdrop.
**Swarf** – Representing the pure observation of the remnants of daily work.
**Cans** – Products of a civilization in excessive consumption, and one of the strangest and filthiest places I have ever known, with gentle and smiling people who didn’t understand why a foreigner would buy trash and carry it himself amidst laughter and surprises and an incomprehensible dialogue.
**Pots** – From a pottery, with an extraordinary kiln whose glowing light dazzled with charm when the adobe wall blocking its fiery entrails was opened, like lost children yet to be born.
**Plastics** – Pigs, filthy and malodorous, human remains… no further comments, always the most visual.
**Tiles** – Representing the signature of a craftsman artist, at the top of a residential volume, a signature with no parallel.
**Number Eight** – Painted by the mastery of a people… Sissi and Daughan, the fruit of centuries of history, tradition, and memory, with a meaning associated with happiness, future, and good fortune.
At the deepest level of my honesty, what I feel most is the selfish nostalgia for the moments and people I will never forget.
Traveling is, beyond the experience of physical distance from the place of origin, accessing an emotional state that offers us a unique and enriching experience of our memory capital.
Discovering new realities with the encouragement of developing an artistic project is certainly a great benefit that I aimed to fully utilize in both artistic and personal aspects. The theme to be developed was exciting in its contemporaneity, and the type of art to be adopted in the realization of the project, although historically predated by novelty, was the most evident and appealing given the location and characteristics of the space to be addressed.
Everything unfolded at the speed of light in my head, in a healthy excitement that only triggered greater creativity. Quickly, the choice of materials and volume to be adopted was found, and the realization of the piece began and unfolded naturally until its installation at the final location.
Each mast/totem was created with an idiosyncrasy reflecting the images and experiences offered by the passage of days, and each one, built with different materials but highlighting a voluntary coherence, can be assigned a meaning. Perhaps this meaning cannot be named individually, but the unique identity of each one converges into a global whole that I intentionally chose to convey, in my own way, what the theme provoked in me and how my creativity was stimulated.
An integral part of the project experience was the interaction and exchange of experiences with the various participants, collaborators, and inhabitants. The perpetual value lies in the exchange of viewpoints, knowledge, and personal and cultural experiences.
Life in the village provided me with an invaluable legacy. I believe that the contact between participants gave each of us an expanded view of our personal work and enriched our interesting perception of different responses to the same stimuli.
On the other hand, the contact with all the participants who were present, either to support the action logistically or to actively participate in the realization of the project, revealed an inexhaustible wealth.
From new visions and interpretations of concepts I thought were definitive, to observing different ways of seeing life and the world, a tremendous gain in personal and professional terms was ensured.
Getting into a taxi and the driver choosing the music that marks our memory, or learning by reading the timeless gestures of the cook on how to prepare a typical delicacy, are new stones in a multicolored pavement.
A pavement that I build without time limit or desire.
"Signs of the Present Time"
Tim Madeira erected signs and confronted them with the imposing nature in a disproportionate face-to-face encounter; like objects from a contemporary archaeology, reflecting certain aspects of what we produce, remnants of our time.
Thus, gathered around trunks, planted on wooden masts, in bunches of metal shavings, blunt iron fragments, and ceramic objects extracted from a clay mix and other unusual materials from our consumption, they are, as Fernando Pessoa wrote, “Fruits of useful iron from the cosmopolitan factory-tree!”
Although Tim’s creative process might resemble that of his Pop Art predecessors, he renews it by displacing it from its known context to make it a disturbing element within nature.
These are sculptures but also Land Art, where the signs planted on the mountainsides are not merely seen as art objects but as triggers for opening up and gaining a new perspective on the landscape.
In a way, it represents an “integration/disturbance” to better articulate what nature knows about itself but can only express with modest, imperceptible, and natural words.
Thus, the artificial produced through his recovery of objects will speak in its language, born from electric fusions, a part of what we should discover there, namely, the humanity of the landscape.
Michel Batlle
Sculpture Artist
about Tim Madeira
Tim Madeira, born in 1955, is a multifaceted artist who studied at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes de Lisboa, completed a course in visual communication at Ar.Co and graduated in architecture at the Escola Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, where he also studied free painting and statue drawing.
His solid background expresses itself through a work essentially anchored in assemblage, where the superposition and conjugation of different materials expresses a conceptual and formal approach, essentially characterized by an uncomplexed free maturity.
