Take five: To Michael Biberstein

In the film directed by Fernando Lopes about the work of Michael Biberstein, entitled "My Friend Mike at Work," we encounter the process and manner in which Biberstein painted. In this documentary, there is an apparent discrepancy between the initial expectation the viewer has of a journey through various works by the painter and the work that unfolds around a single painting. To see "Mike at Work" is to approach the action that is constructed between pauses, retreats, the various preparatory steps of the canvas for painting, and the painting itself as an act and simultaneously a moment of reflection and pause in the author's gaze. It is to be so close as if it were possible to know the interstices of his thought and his intentionality. But above all, to understand that his gaze is our temporal condition for integrating the spirituality that his work transmits to us.

This exhibition, entitled "Take Five – To Michael Biberstein," brings together six artists who were his contemporaries: John Baldessari, Fernando Calhau, Jorge Molder, Matt Mullican, Julião Sarmento, and Lawrence Wiener. Six elements of a geography that unfolds amidst complicity, friendship in life and work, the cities that became meeting points, the exhibitions in which they participated, and music as an invisible, yet almost tactile, horizon. Common traits that bring together this sextet for whom jazz has marked the rhythm of the decades in which they have all been present.

For Dave Brubeck, author of the music from which the exhibition's title was taken, "Take Five," it was also a new experience in terms of composition and interpretation at the end of the 1950s. Common traits between music and visual arts are celebrated in Torres Vedras, at the Communication and Culture Cooperative. On the other hand, "Take Five" is a colloquial American expression used to indicate an interlude, or a break. A moment of attention, or a pause, to see the works in this exhibition and Mike Biberstein at work.