As part of the tenth anniversary of the Nadir Afonso Museum of Contemporary Art (MACNA), the exhibition Crossroads reveals contact points between the paths of Álvaro Siza (1933) and Nadir Afonso (1920-2013), the most obvious being the construction of a space noble enough to house the artist’s work in Chaves. The invitation came in 2003—when the two truly met—and with it the simultaneous desire for a new studio that would never be used as such, due to Nadir’s death at the age of 93.

In 2016, Siza inaugurated an anthropomorphically-shaped building, suspended over the Tâmega River. Its architecture condensed the neighbouring Roman Bridge’s spatiality, the Haus der Kunst’s (Munich) neoclassical order, the Maison-atelier Ozenfant’s (Paris) filtered light, the Villa Savoye’s (Poissy) avant-garde fenêtre en longueur, the Ibirapuera Park’s (São Paulo), verdant horizontality, and Nadir Afonso’s kinetic geometry, paying tribute to the impact of 20th-century artistic movements on the Platonic forms of our contemporary modernity.

This marks the transition—or rather, the continuum—from art to architecture and vice versa, a theme that both opens and closes the exhibition’s chronology. The beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning, because both artists enrolled at Porto School of Fine Arts (ESBAP), eleven years apart, contradicting their personal aspirations given that architecture was not their foremost dream.

This exhibition, curated by António Choupina, is part of the Serralves Collection Touring Exhibition Programme, which aims to make the Foundation’s collection accessible to different audiences across the country.

Production: Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto