The Spanish artist Carlos Aires is a smiley character, but his powerful new artwork in Lisbon’s Palacio Condes da Ribeira Grande is anything but. Hanging above the altar space of a splendid baroque chapel, which rises through three floors in the west wing of the palace, is a composition of historical figures from Portuguese banknotes, the explorer Bartolomeu Dias among them. At the touch of a button this screen slides open to reveal a black Christ suspended against a video of a bloody and billowing apocalyptic sky. “I grew up in Andalusia surrounded by Catholic iconography,” says Aires, who has named the work Trinity after the first atomic bomb test.
Look again at the banknote figures on the screen and you’ll see a gentleman in modern dress huddled in their midst. This is Armando Martins, the Portuguese property developer and art collector who commissioned the artwork from Aires and owns the palace that houses it. This vast 18th-century edifice extends along 120 metres of the Rua da Junqueira, one block back from the Tagus River and the 25 de Abril Bridge. For much of the 20th century it housed a series of secondary schools. Yesterday, however, following a restoration and extension by the Portuguese architectural studio Metrourbe, the palace reopened as Museu de Arte Contemporanea Armando Martins or Macam, a new museum for Martins’s collection. It’s a significant addition to the Lisbon art scene.
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