Tournée is an art project by Francisco Eduardo that integrates several components:
The artist is the author of the works, the curator of the show, the director, and co-producer of the exhibition project; In developing Tournée Francisco Eduardo collaborates with José Maia, Sérgio Couto, Samuel Silva and Fátima Séneca, hence making obvious that the working process takes shape and advances through the exchange of ideas circulating within a team; The project is performative as it is announced via a single poster, which the author will exhibit as he pleases following his daily movements throughout the city1. It is also performative because this public presentation of the project will be repeated and reformulated in the media, in several talks with the artist, and in the guided tour that will happen in each and every show; The artworks are drawings, and will be exhibited in several locations with different features, in a national itinerancy estimated to last a year and a half, starting April the 18th, at Galeria Dama Aflita in Porto; Each show is unique, inevitably adjusting itself to each particular context of the exhibitions " space, atmosphere, public ", and renews itself consecutively at every venue, as the sold artworks are progressively replaced; These drawings may be understood as “originals of copies” because Francisco Eduardo draws free handedly several posters that appeal to him, leveling through this appropriation what one sees as unique, serial, original, copy, forgery, multiple, secondary, disposable, ephemeral, transient, popular, advertisement, entertainment, playful, leisurely, informative, artistic or collectable; The working process is morose, careful, rigorous, disciplined, and in this sense recuperates features of drawing which sometimes are considered less expressive because they appear to be inorganic; Francisco Eduardo investigates the thinking of the art when he decides to “draw in English”, as this stance acknowledges that both the formal decisions and the criticism in art derive from words and transcend the image; And finally, in Tournée the artist reenacts an art patronage status quo, but overthrows it as he decides instead to promote CTT-Portuguese Mail, in place of asking this company to fund his art project.


1 As Mário Cesariny with Alexandre O’Neil may have done in 1947, when they went for a walk at 11 p.m. through Avenida da Liberdade in Lisbon carrying the painting “O Operário”, in an itinerant art show. It seems also interesting to note that Cesariny was under constant surveillance by the Criminal Police of Lisbon between 1953 and 58 because he was suspected of vagrancy.


Francisco Eduardo
by Fátima Séneca




duardo supports, based on free will, the CTT Mail of Portugal,
giving it's logo visibility.
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