#March 10th 2025 to April 15th 2025 at MAD GAllery, Marvila, Lisbon

 

Maria Castel-Branco returns after four very emotional years and brings us a new exhibition.

This comeback reinforces her strongest assets, resilience and creativity. Matters of great matter in her personal life and her existence as a ceramist.

She now comes to us with hands full of colors, life, light and the fruits of an umbilical memory of her perception of Nature. References from her Mother, who raised plants as children. In her house there was even the Plant Room. All so green and vibrant, growing to the sound of the pieces of music she played on her vertical piano. Her home was her little oasis.  The greatest inheritance she left to her children is planted in pots.

For Maria Castel-Branco, then with a still immature perception – she recalls now – they were just pots with plants. Shelves full of them. But she now knows they filled as many landscapes as those we find described in books.

“I sometimes slept in the plant room and, when lying down, looking at the silhouette, under the Moonlight, the contours of that small forest, brought me stillness and a feeling of comfort.”

And, in the morning, with the plentifulness of the Sun, that room became a spectacle of green, where each artist wore a different tone.

Maria knew all their veins, stalks, stems, stigmas and roots, bulbs and buds which, in an explosion of life, gave her the certainty that one day she would engrave all the details of their lines in some sort of soil. That same path was being drawn and, surely, it was traced in the palms of her hands. These same hands that, through some alchemy, brought to us this new exhibition, full of maternal inheritance.

“After a few years of various professional challenges and personal trials,

 It is assured that Time always brings Spring back to me!”

 

© Cuca Carou 2025