BESart. Banco Espírito Santo Collection

The exhibition The Present: An Infinite Dimension is a full account of the photography collection that the Banco Espírito Santo has assembled over the last four years, with over four-hundred and fifty works by one-hundred seventy six artists, both Portuguese and foreign, prestigious and emerging. This highly varied collection of photographic images offers us first-hand knowledge of the changes and advances that have taken place in contemporary art in the last twenty years.
To collect is to capture a particular vision of a time, and a collection must accept that art is the result of a creative, social and historical context. This exhibition springs from the Banco Espírito Santo's desire to share, with a broad cross-section of the public, the need to speak of the present and imagine a hypothetical future through artworks, as well as to offer a panorama of the world that only artists can give us. The BESart collection offers us a plurality of viewpoints, inviting all of us to reflect upon our reality, stimulated by works that illustrate both the marks of the past and diverse cultural. Social, economic and political aspects of our present.

This collection includes works on subjects such as the subjectivity of photography, a return to realism, and the relation between theoretical photography and general easthetics. ln contemporary art, photography has become somewhat less pragmatic, in a technical sense, and more creative, in a poetic one. ln other words, it is more a process than a medium.
Historically, the photograph was a document traditionally associated with the rhetoric of an emotional language that has gone so far as to regulate the perception and evolution of documentary images. Today, however, there are thousands of codes with which to interpret photography and its multiple readings. Until the nineteen eighties, photography was barely accepted as art. That is why postmodernism forces the matter, showing how photography (as an infinitely dispersed representation of reality) is the medium through which we see everything.

The exhibition The Present: An Infinite Dimension, drawn from the BESart collection, is a selection of works linked by a subtle thread that seeks to offer a summarized view of the most significant characteristics of artistic practice in recent decades, fostering an understanding of the different kinds of behavior that stem from a commitment to the here and now. At first glance, we could say that the emphasis is placed on diversity, more than on a formal or thematic unity. Nevertheless, the works being shown are linked by many different types of connections, creating codes that resound throughout the exhibition. After all, it is no easy task to penetrate the overflowing nature of current art, and in that sense, this exhibition is also conceived as a short story. A story that unfolds in a series of settings or sections linking proposals by different generations of Portuguese or foreign artists. The divisions in no way seek to classify or categorize; they are intended only as a way of adding fluidity and clarity to the route. Each of the eight sections focuses on certain traits, obsessions or shared ideas, strange affinities or peculiar encounters, independent of geography and outside any fixed time-frame. The proposals are characterized by their diverse nature and bring out the plurallty of possibilities that coexist in the medium of contemporary photography.

The idea behind the selection of works and its exhibition in thematic sections – Natures; Private Universes; Portraits; Narrations, Fictions and Realities; Society and Urban Life; Concepts, ldeas and Criticism; Spaces, Places and Objects; and Architectures – is to show the public photography as a fascinating medium filled with multiple facets, and to emphasize the diversity and depth of artistic thinking in the field of photography.

María de Corrall and Lorena Martinez de Corrall, curators
[excerpt from the text published in the catalogue]