Virgínia Goes
“Beyond Chess”

The work of the painter Virgínia Goes is fascinating for the textural treatment of her most preferred theme, the chess game symbolism. Goes’s choice of this subject makes her somehow unique in the national panorama. It also associates her to various foreign painters, who for various centuries have painted the same topic. In the present era, for instance, it associates her to the work by Marcel Duchamp and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

The contents of her paintings reflect her deep knowledge of the symbolism, in general, and of the chess game, in particular. She has been developing her knowledge through deep study all along a career of many years. Her studies are rigorous, thus allowing her to create works of art of high quality.

Having had the opportunity of accompanying her labour as an iconologist, an art and a chess historian, I certify the care she puts into the preparation of her work. She has thus encouraged a growing interest for the study of a thematic that was still in need, in our milieu, of a finer, deeper research. Besides, there is a persistent inspiration from the work of Jerome Bosch of which she has an extensive knowledge.

For all this, I consider that the work of Virgínia Goes has been contributing for the enrichment of the Portuguese art and culture. By the same token, her work began widespread international demand.

Dagoberto Markl
Corresponding National Vowel of the National Academy of Fine arts of Lisbon

Virginia Goes and the Chess Game

It is an honor and privilege to the city of Lisbon, in general, and to those initiated in painting, in particular, to have the opportunity of exhibiting, again, at the Republic and Résistance Library Museum (RRLM), this marked-by-genius painter. It is certain that her work is already internationally known. It has been delayed, however, the national recognition of her exceptional paintings, mainly of her lucky and inedited association of symbolism to the chess game, as an almost recurrent theme in her art. We could not leave, therefore, this important exhibition without a word of thanks and joy.

First, we express our thanks to the painter for having chosen among other possibilities the RRLM City Campus Space to locate her exhibition. Second, we also express our joy because, either under the painter’s viewpoint or under the institution’s viewpoint, we have the guarantee that all of us shall benefit from another extraordinary art display. In conclusion, we are happy to share this exhibition with a growing number of interested people on the artist’s work and, above all, with those interested on her special theme—the chess game symbolism.

Lisbon, November 5, 2005
João Mário Mascarenhas
Director of the RRLM, Lisbon

The eternal feminine attract us to the highest.
Goethe, Faust

In Virgínia Goes’s paintings, chess is a mythical symbology, a transcendental quest, an exercise of ascetic discipline. There co-live fear, time, hourglasses, light warriors, good and bad luck, tortoises as symbols of cosmic harmony, black horses as archetypes of beauty and vitality. Under an inspiring moonlight, silence and soli-tude influence the environment. In it, there also co-exist dreams, desires, emotions, mandalas, illusions, checkmates, good and bad spirits, visible and invisible enemies. While the sun engenders subtle intermediate shadows between light and darkness, the eternal feminine principle rules. In this way, the allegoric fight between the two opposite forces of nature is always present. In her painting, the artist reveals the essence of chess, as game of kings and king of all games, demanding not only the dominion of the adversary and his territory but, above all, the inner dominion of the player himself. The interior division of the human psyches is also a combat stage. How many qualities do we need for such a game battle! In her art, Virgínia Goes underlines the symbolism of accepting the alternating matrix. She unveils the human beings’ acts image, specially their aspiration chessboards.

Through her painting, Virgínia Goes warns us that we are One in the plenitude of Love and Liberty. Such as Art, Life and Chess, everything is unforeseen and strikes unexpectedly.

Margarida Ruas Gil Costa
Curator of the Water Museum, Lisbon

Translation by Fernando Alves

Wood, First Phase

The current tendency of Virginia Goes’ artistic creation is a clear immersion in that slope of contemporary art that elects as auto-representation both the natural object and the object recuperated from the wearing away of the daily use.  I.e., such object is simultaneously the meaning and the significant of the representation.  It is the motive of the representation; it is, at the same time, the representation.

And in the action of the object showing itself, but with the intention of producing significance, in circumstances that disconnect it from the context of its existence or from the initial function for which it was created, the pretension of being understood as an artistic object is implicit.  It is in this sense that we must understand the current experiences of Virginia Goes, who does not fear the salutary adventure of walking on a path sown with so many risks.

The wood is Virginia Goes’ field of exploration.  Her speech is organized between the probable trunk of a tree, the frame of a window or the door of a cupboard, for example.  Natural textures of wood, veins and knots, marks of the strikes of the human action, deeper or shallower wounds in the surface of the wood, nailing, rhythmically opened out spaces, vestiges of decorative patterns in the cushion of a door, everything serves the purpose of the research of a discovery of sense that seeks, with the intervention of the imagination, a figurative order in these marks randomly exhibited by the body of the wood. For example, in the painted and repainted surfaces in dense rough textures, the knots of the wood can either be transformed in a rose windowof a Gothic cathedral or in the volute of a jonic capital, elements that Virginia Goes combines in the structuring of misty architectures with a fantastic eclecticism. And the rustic result obtained is an ironic allusion to the transparency of the artistic models of the past referred there.  Everything becomes a game whose rules are clearly displayed.

But this is not the only path Virginia Goes is following.  Virginia Goes hesitates between the possibility of attaching herself to a figuration even if subject to the random, and the possibility of assuming the brutal totality of the objectuality of the material she manipulates.  And we believe when she explores this second possibility, neighbour to so many informal and objectual experiences, the coherence of the results is stronger.  Thus, the frame of a window is really the frame of a window that by the simple fact of having been subtracted to its initial function, forces us to see it now in a new way, i.e.  appreciating the undeniable plastic qualities of the deterioration that the marks of the time left in it. And this way, a dialogue is opened between the spectator and the space/time of an object, which by the artistic statute to which it aspires, now assumes its singularity.  And whenever this happens, the objective of the proposal of Virginia Goes will have completely fulfilled its purpose. 

David Lopes
Prof. in Fine Arts Nacional Society, Lisbon