Etching | 2021 | 33x35cm

Chain
Sara Alves

Description: This etching depicts a chain of distorted anthropomorphic figures, each silencing the next by covering their mouths. The work explores themes of censorship, oppression and the cyclical nature of violence, drawing inspiration from conflicts and testimonies like the Yugoslav conflicts.

It reflects on how manipulation and war can turn neighbors into enemies, symbolized by the chained figures as both victims and enforcers of silence. Engaging with memory and justice, the piece confronts the erasure of truth and the scars left by conflicts, serving as a reflection on humanity’s vulnerability to division and the enduring need for accountability and remembrance.

About the artist: Sara Alves (Lisbon, 2000) is a multidisciplinary Portuguese artist. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Museology and Museography at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon and is an intern at CACE - State Contemporary Art Collection. She completed, in 2023, a Bachelor’s degree in Painting at FBAUL.

Her artistic work is essentially framed within Figurative Art and Surrealism. It traverses territories as varied as painting, drawing, illustration, engraving, ceramics, glass and textiles, as well as graphic design and museological activity. Since 2020, she has essentially developed two projectual paths of work, a surrealist path (oneiric and/or of social critique) and another of landscape painting.

The first path is associated with the psychological and ontological complexity of the human being and its celebration, either in a more intimate way or through a look at the collective. Here arise works related to introspection, the lyrical, the oneiric, the intimate; it is where the recurring anthropomorphic figures already very characteristic of her work inhabit. The focus also expands to society, a process mainly triggered by the COVID-19 crisis.

These are mostly monochromatic works, with a negative connotation and critique of contemporary social behaviors or processes, such as mechanization, surveillance or human alienation. This projectual path has an awareness-raising intention and celebratory approach to human life.

Landscape painting is an opposite path, of “liberation,” materialized in oil or oil pastel.
​Color is explored in the imprimatura, contributing to a contemporary vision of landscape painting. It is mostly plein air painting and aims at an approach to nature, in a kind of overcoming of the monochromatic aspect of the previous path and context, not only through color but also through the purity of the motifs and the mode of creation.