Horizon

Galeria Pedro Cera is pleased to announce Horizon, the first solo exhibition by Matt Keegan at the gallery. In the summer of 2011, Matt Keegan visited Lisbon for the first time, on the occasion of a group show curated by Ana Cardoso.

During this trip he met Ana’s mother, Helena Cardoso. Invited to have a solo exhibition at Galeria Pedro Cera, he contacted Helena to see if she would be willing to collaborate in a open-ended way. In the course of subsequent email and phone correspondence Helena shared photos and ephemera from her time working for TAP, Portugal’s national airline, and from trips to New York City during the early 1970s. Continuing Matt Keegan’s interest in personal and social archives, he was drawn to these photographs of and by Helena. It is from these materials and related stories that Horizon emerged.

Matt has investigated language and created text-based works since his undergraduate studies. At play in Horizon is the poetics of language, as found in his paintings that feature the word Shadows. The word appears and disappears behind optical lines that function as a lenticular device. Language‘s centrality in communication and exchange is also evident in the presentation of two etchings that Helena made from a photograph of Keegan’s wrist tattoo of an airplane. Additionally, Matt selected photos of Helena’s that he framed under transparent primary-colored Plexiglas.

These same colors were used as transparencies by Helena’s son, Miguel, a Lisbon-based cinematographer, who filmed his mother at her favorite beach and around the city. This video, also titled Horizon, shows Helena in present-day Lisbon.