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Foreword by the Chairman of Amadora Municipal Council
Ricardo Cabral The Gaze Constructs The World
The significance of the scenario to a story is one of the things which separates comics from other visual media. A scenario contextualises and influences the way readers interiorise a narrative. This year, “Scenario” is the theme chosen for the 24th International Comic Festival. The challenge proposed for this year’s festival was to perpetuate the built heritage of the city of Amadora through comics. To that end, we invited the illustrator Ricardo Cabral who, with undeniable talent, designed the image for the 2013 AmadoraBD and the result could not have been better. A strong and powerful connotation is
By Sara Figueiredo Costa The Ricardo Cabral exhibition held at this year’s AmadoraBD starts from the premise of expanding the merely retrospective element customarily associated with the exhibitions of the work of the featured authors at each festival in order to widen the focus to include the relationship of the author’s work to the theme underlying this year’s festival: the scenario. Fulfilling the retrospective element, the exhibition begins by presenting a brief diachronic introduction to Cabral’s work, beginning with the short stories which appeared in disparate publications and
what best defines the drawing produced by this year’s featured artist, to whom we dedicate an exhibition to provide comic lovers with an opportunity to (re)experience his work. Inevitably, the 24th International Comic Festival will make its presence felt all around the municipality, with a series of varied exhibitions on the ninth art spread around the main municipal venues, making this one of the most prestigious comic festivals at the national and international level. This year, the commemoration of two events stands out: the 75th anniversary of both Superman and Spirou. For each of these characters, we have organised an exhibition in partnership, respectively, with the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco and the Belgian Comic Strip Centre in Brussels. Alongside the usual competitions and award ceremony, autograph sessions, book presentations and the unmissable ‘encounters’, this year the festival also includes the Caricature Party, much enjoyed by lovers of this art form and the general public alike. The exhibition in homage to Geraldes Lino (a self-proclaimed “comic and fanzine militant”), the exhibition “Scenographing Humour”, centred on the work of the winners of the 2013 AmadoraCartoon Award, and the exhibition dedicated to Ana Biscaia, an artist honoured at the 17th National Illustration Awards, are further reasons why Amadora is a city that deserves to be visited during these days.
ending with the albums produced under his own name. Based on this small initial retrospective, what is then proposed is a reflection on the role of the scenario in the author’s work, by illustrating the different ways in which he uses and approaches this element in his various creations, and an analysis which seeks to extend it towards a broader category, that of space, which seems to underpin his way of looking at the world. Marked by his deep relationship with space and underpinned by codes ranging from journalism to travel diary-writing, the gaze which constructs the world is, ultimately, a kind of founding and cross-cutting element of Cabral’s work, and for that reason it is this element which we shall focus on.
Chairman of the Council Carla Tavares
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The scenario When talking of the importance of the scenario in comics, or even in illustration, one is talking of an essential component of a considerable part of the work which falls into this medium, insofar as everything takes places within a certain topological and more or less fantasy, abstract, realistic or even empty space. Even if no scenario exists, its non-existence is seen in terms of the fact that it does not exist, and as such it is impossible to speak of the absolute absence of scenario. Despite this generalisation, there are authors whose work owes an essential part of its narrative structure to the scenario, not merely due to the myriad semantic levels which it encompasses, but also to the dependence of the narrative progression on the space in which it takes place. Ricardo Cabral often gives his scenarios a level of signification that goes beyond that of a mere prop. Besides furnishing the necessary spatial coordinates for the context, the scenarios constructed by the artist create semantics which are essential to the narrative, a feature which becomes more evident with each new work. One of the most noticeable features of this is the contrast between interior and exterior spaces, in which the scenarios are related to the opposites of safety and risk, intimacy and exposure, protection and defencelessness. This contrast is clear in some of the panels in Evereste, for example in the illustrations of the tents used to shelter the members of the mountaineer João Garcia’s team. The representation of the inside of the tents, in which the detail of the equipment, clothing, sleeping bags and instruments used by the climbers during their arduous ascent of Mt. Everest are visible, contrasts with the intimidat-