Text by
Adelaide Duarte*
Tubolagem is a word absent from the main dictionaries of the Portuguese language. A virgin word, unmanufactured, it phonetically resembles the feminine term tubagem (piping) and etymologically stems from tubo (tube) with the suffix -agem. It suggests a system or guiding flow through pipes, but also conveys the ideas of durability and resistance, of structure and support—concepts that heavily inform Maria José Oliveira’s work.
The choice to title the exhibition Tubolagem with a g arose from an August conversation between Maria José Oliveira and her friend Alberto Caetano about the piece Coluna Vertebral (Spinal Column). Now featured in the gallery, this piece provides the exhibition’s structure. The title was proposed around the gallery’s worktable, with Zé Mário writing “tubolagem” in a notebook, captivated by the pieces gradually unwrapped before him. To fix the term and avoid confusing it with tubagem, they sounded it out syllable by syllable, tu-bo-la-gem. As they grew accustomed to its strangeness and speculated on its meaning, the word gained consensus. Zé Mário, with pointed irony, confirmed, “I only work with young artists.” He recalled Lygia Pape and Ana Vieira, two artists in constant innovation, who, as he put it, were at the “tip of the iceberg,” with works advancing boldly and without fear. Maria José added the Italian-French Gina Pane to the conversation, evoking her performance A Hot Afternoon 3 (1978), staged at Quadrum. Pane, to the audience’s amazement, pierced the (im)possible gallery glass—drawing in the air the parentheses of the prefix im.
Maria José Oliveira is a young artist with a constantly evolving body of experimental, performative work. With the ability to elicit emotions through simple objects, Maria José brings them to life, lending her own body to the works—her spine, her arms, her heartbeat—animating them, breathing into them, touching them, infusing them with soul and sensitivity in a transformative silence.
Much of Maria José Oliveira’s work begins with the spinal column, as the artist aligns her own bony structure with the piece she is assembling. Her work is often supported by tubular constructions, typically crafted from humble materials, with a preference for paper due to its lightness, malleability, and accessibility—even repurposing cardboard tubes from Adelaide Duarte toilet paper. Using unconventional, sometimes organic materials gathered from nature, delicate and potentially ephemeral, she embraces the radicalism of arte povera, a movement that resonates through her work. She identifies with this movement through her ability to harness and give life to materials that might otherwise seem inert. To her, they are full of possibilities. She reimagines past “scraps” as entities with enduring value, transforming their utilitarian simplicity and giving them a new, lasting purpose. “All materials are good; the key is not to fear them,” declares the “material witch” as Alberto Caetano affectionately dubs her. Maria José agrees, adding, “It’s just a shame I’m not a witch of other things.”
“Put through fire and flame,” as she describes it, Maria José devotes herself to the creation of each piece, using her own physical fragility, her spine, as material. For her, art is alchemy, a process of transmuting materials, creating harmony with objects, without ever separating life from the process. Her materials are transformed, fitted together. Maria José captures their essence and allows herself to be changed by them in return. A corset, a spinal column, a robe, an archive drawer, a coat sleeve —these illustrate her way of thinking and acting. Besides gathering materials, some are also brought to her by close friends who know her artistic inclinations. Many friends collect materials they know she’ll find enticing—fish bones, empty boxes, cardboard, peach prunings, bricks, tree leaves, used tea bags—items that form a “tubolagem” or structure for her to fill. These collected materials also carry emotional ties, enriching the alchemy and memory within her artistic creation. Tubolagem brings together works from the past three decades, each representing something unique. It is a memory exhibition—of the artist and the creation of these works—but also forward-looking in its consistency of artistic approach and worldview. The pieces evoke stories, often left untold, poetically woven through the display. Some of these stories lean toward surrealism in their unusual, subversive composition (Le Dur Désir de Durer… (Paul Éluard), 1996, 1998, 2021, 2024; Closer to You, 2004); others nod to art history (Bosch’s Alchemy, 2017), inserting her own story within it. Some pieces reference literature, philosophy, and thought (The Visible and Invisible Merleau-Ponty, 2021), while others are reinterpretations or displayed publicly for the first time (Aventuroso, 2018).
Common to them all is a questioning of the materials that constitute them, inviting reflection on the home as both laboratory and part of the workspace. Everything within the home becomes an instrument—a sort of paintbrush— for Maria José. She uses coffee to create washes, achieving various brown shades on paper, bread dough she chars with a candle or gas, fire to perforate paper or plastic; eggshells are alchemical, the bathtub a vat for dyeing fabric or paper. Her grandson’s drawing recalls to her the face of the surrealist Jean Cocteau, which she then incorporates into a larger work In every exhibition, Maria José Oliveira revives memories—the memory of the space she occupies and the objects inscribed within it. She emphasizes small cracks, embraces peeling paint, the marks left by nails on walls. For Maria José, these traces signify the passage of time, and rather than concealing or avoiding them, she embraces them fully, reveling in the freedom of her art.
*This text was written based on conversations held between the author, Maria José Oliveira, Alberto Caetano, and José Mário Brandão, in preparation for the exhibition Tubolagem at the Galeria Graça Brandão, on August 13th and September 18th, 2024. Whenever quotation marks are used in the text, the exact expression used in the conversation is intended to be respected.