"Levadas" is the name given in Madeira to the irrigation canals that since the sixteenth century transport water from the mountain peaks of the north to the south, more populated and with greater agricultural production. The levadas are a hallmark of the island, and are also symbolized in Casa das Mudas, the contemporary art museum that architect Paulo David designed in 2004 for the fate of the coastal town of Calheta. The first thing you see of this museum that you visit from top to bottom is the flat roof on which furrows extend from which flowers and endemic plants sprout that give the precise touch of color to an endless balcony overlooking the Atlantic. The building, which was selected for the Mies van der Rohe Prize and received the Alvar Aalto Medal, hosts until October a retrospective of Lourdes Castro, the greatest artist who gave Madeira in the twentieth century, who knew how to leave behind a colonialist and conservative country and then return to finish her vital work in peace with conscience. that is, with childhood and its ditches. He knew, in short, what Cioran called the advantages of exile, the best "school of vertigo".
The exhibition, entitled Like an island on the sea, closes, according to its curator, Márcia de Sousa, "the essence of its land and its understanding of nature, light, shadow, traditions, life".
Castro was born in Funchal in 1930. She grew up among the waters, the levadas and the embroidery women of Madeira. He managed to leave in the fifties, when leaving meant going to study in Lisbon. In the school of Fine Arts he suspended thoroughly. Three magnificent paintings in which the word "excluded" is painted, as she found them in class, give an account of this. According to the teachers, it was forbidden to use the line, she used the line. It was forbidden to paint an unbalanced body, she painted a headless bust. It was forbidden to paint a body that did not follow the real scale, she painted a woman with cubist forms. To the street. Happily deported from the academy, freedom took her to Munich and then, through Vieira da Silva, she had access to a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to live in Paris, where she arrived with her first husband, René Bértholo. It triumphed at the 1959 Biennial. In the sixties she began to make works based on silhouettes with different materials: paintings and serigraphs, being a pioneer in the use of plexiglass or upholstery. He started the series Projected Shadows, in which the colored shadows of friends such as Christo and Jan Voss appear. The last plexiglass shadow was his mother's, the only transparent one, because no one can let in any more light. Thus he captured the evanescence of perishable reality. He became fond of performance, and presented himself with his colorful plexiglass ties that earned him to appear in Vogue.
The purity of the lines led her to the series Sombras Deitadas. When she wanted to cast her shadow on the bed, she said: "On my island the sheets are neither painted nor trimmed, they are embroidered", and, like those Madeira embroiderers of yesteryear, she began to embroider shadows of lying couples, silhouettes that gave her visibility. Later, with the artist Manuel Zimbro, his most enduring partner, they created shadow plays using a curtain, some lights and his body. So much research and so much work make her related today to other artists of her generation, also exiled, such as the painter Paula Rego or the photographer Helena Almeida.
He returned to Madeira in 1983 and acquired a house in communion with nature, surrounded by laurel forest and levadas. One afternoon last year he felt bad. Before going to the hospital, he wrote the note that concludes the exhibition: "Don't cry for me, I'm just going to transform." Water.
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