Manuela Pimentel
Manuela Pimentel (b. 1979, Portugal) ingeniously fuses together references to the traditional handicraft art of painted mural tiles with the aesthetics of street billboards and their cumulative layers of ripped and lacerated advertising posters. Bearing in mind post-war artists of the New Realism movement such as Mimmo Rotella, Raymond Hains or Jacques Villeglé, Pimentel incorporates fragments of street posters she takes off herself or uses them as supports for her painted interventions.
Using acrylic colours, the artist accurately reproduces traditional figures and scenes taken from the visual culture of the Portuguese tiles (azulejos). By integrating the tiles’ conventional chromaticism, iconography and naif-style rendering into specific wall-mounted artworks, and by merging all of it with torn street posters, adding resins, rough mortar and neon lights, the artist reconfigures the place of the tile as a popular and decorative expression that used to belong to local collective memory to inscribe it in the space of global artistic creation.
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