Connecting de Sandra Baía

In the installations of the Casal Solleric Sandra Baía manages to sensitize the viewer about the plasticity of architecture. She works with the resonance of space, encouraging the public to enter into a dialogue between what they see and how they understand what they see. The artist activates resonances, creating landscapes within landscapes. Because in her work there is always something of illusion and something of reality, something of mental construction and something of physical inheritance of space, which the creator manages to “abstract” producing a dissolution of the environment, paradoxically multiplying its forms. As spectators we move in an undefined space, with signs that, before locating ourselves, lead us to experience displacements and energies that show us more the “between” than the why of things.

They are works that are integrated into the architecture, as if they wanted to coexist in symbiosis as a second skin, an enlarged reflection of the building, a sensory experience or object-environment that demands the observer’s gaze and his physical and psychological attention. Sandra Baía interacts with the space of Casal Solleric and with the city and shares that kind of unstable equilibrium that characterizes her work.

His mastery of scale, his sense of orientation and balance, his relationship with the context that hosts the work, the search for the displacement of the viewer and the dimension of time, the careful capture of light, his visual deceptions..., make his interventions a unique experience; because the intention is not to propose a reflection to the viewer, but to modify his perception, to establish fissures. That is why the intention of his mirrored surfaces is to interrupt and unfold the spatial vision, allowing the contraction and expansion of space itself. Our gaze is lost in a space that stretches and deforms.

If there is something seductive about Sandra Baía’s works, it is how in many occasions she manages to appeal to all the senses at the same time, which, together with her visual deceptions from the plastic, allow each of her exhibition appointments to be an atmospheric experience that incites our emotional sensitivity.

Born in Lisbon (Portugal), she studied Visual Arts at the Sociedad Nacional de Bellas Artes. She has exhibited regularly since 2000, with special mention of Wild Urbanity, Galeria Filomena Soares (2023); Finger Print, Fundación Manolo Paz (2022); Formas encontradas, Mudas Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Madeira (2021); Dialogues with Amadeo, Museu Municipal Amadeo de Souza Cardoso (2021); One’s story is not enough, Galeria Fernando Santos (2019); Half The Sky, Fundação Àrpád Szenes-Vieira da Silva (2019); There Are Always Places Along The Way, Terreiro das Missas, Belém, Lisboa (2018); or Entalada, Travessa da Ermida Project (2018).

His work is in collections such as the Berardo Collection; Portuguese Cinemateca; Museo Helga de Alvear; François Schneider Foundation; Fundación DIDAC; Julião Sarmento Collection; Mudas Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Madeira; Museu Municipal Amadeu Souza Cardoso; Norlinda and José Lima Collection; Fundación Manolo Paz; o Travessa da Ermida Project.