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Established in 2010 and consolidated in its present form in 2013, Underdogs works with a diversified roster of Portuguese and international artists connected with the urban inspired contemporary art universe, fostering the development of close relationships between creators, the public, and the city with the aim of promoting art as an everyday experience.
“The value of cities is measured by the number of places they reserve for improvisation.”
– Siegfried Kracauer
Like a child picking up sticks in the forest, Espack walks the cities and picks up inspiration from visual elements that catch his eye for one reason or another – vernacular stuff, unusual architecture, hand-painted signs, children's drawings, teenage scribbles, raw graffiti. Viewing the city as a vast playground, living its environment to the full, he sips in its overlooked, neglected details, capturing them for posterity while blending them with his own graffiti drawings in order to compose a new visual vocabulary. One that reinterprets, that shifts their significance, that establishes new forms and new meaning.
The outcome of this sensitive approach and poetic vision on urban and suburban melancholy is showcased here in the form of a site-specific installation that mixes old and new works: sculptures in wood and polystyrene, painting, photography. An assortment of the weird and wonderful derived from his work in recent years, his experience during the lockdown, and his visit to Lisbon.
* The title can be translated into English as “pieces of wood” or “sticks”
