Madragoa is delighted to present Waterfall house for a skateboarder, Luís Lázaro Matos’ selection of works presented at Artissima XYZ, and installed at the gallery.

Apparently lighthearted and playful, Luís Lázaro Matos’ works actually investigate complex dynamics dealing with current social and philosophical constructions shaping contemporary forms of narrative. In his lush and colorful graphic figurations humor and drama coexist opening up discourses which allude to both intimate and social dynamics, often dealing with identity politics and queerness. As metaphorical portraits of today’s communal aesthetic, imbued with his personal experiences as a digital native, Luís Lázaro Matos’ works reveal shared emotional imageries. For Present Future the artist is showing a selection of drawings from his recent project Summer Waterfalls & Autumn Leaves (2019), representing imaginary houses for skateboarders built on top of waterfalls, all accompanied by an original album conceived by the artist himself. Seemingly encounters between Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1935 Fallingwater, skatepark architectures, classical ruins, futuristic landscapes, monstrous creatures and quasianimated animals, the eccentric drawings become surrealist dreamlike settings for humorous, romantic stories. The recurring waterfall acts, according to Luís Lázaro Matos, as a powerful metaphor for the uncontainable restlessness due to those emotional charge that drive toward the affirmation of an identity. These fantastical environments become a stage on which a personal dramaturgy is set in motion.

(Fernanda Brenner, Ilaria Gianni)

Luís Lázaro Matos was born in 1987 in Lisbon, Portugal and lives and works in Lisbon. He obtained the degree in Painting from Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon University in 2010, and the BA in Art Practice at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include: Summer Waterfalls & Autumn Leaves, Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2019), Zoo, Casa da Cerca, Almada (2019), WHITE SHARK CAFE, Bastide Projects, Marseille (2018), Super Gibraltar, Kunsthalle Lis- sabon, Li- sbon (2015). In 2019, Lázaro Matos was awarded the On Demand Prize at Miart 2019 for his project The Fictional Passengers. In Sep- tember 2020, his solo exhibition titled Waves and Whirlpools opened at Galeria Municipal do Porto, curated by Martha Kirszenbaum.