PORTO.- The artistic career of Jorge Martins (Lisbon, 1940) began in the 1960s. Consistently faithful to the fields of painting and drawing, his oeuvre reflects his experience and understanding of the various places where he has lived and worked, including Paris and New York.

Hosted simultaneously in Serralves Museum and Fundação Carmona e Costa in Lisbon, The Substance of Time is the largest retrospective exhibition devoted to the artist's drawings.

Serralves displays over 200 works, created between 1965 and 2012, that reveal his constant appropriation of everyday items and his exhaustive research into modes of representation, in particular how light can reinvent space and objects.

Jorge Martins’ drawings presented in The Substance of Time are primarily abstract and without colour. They present a language that is rich in textures, intensities and shades and which unfolds in continuous variations.

The fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue, co-published by Fundação de Serralves and Fundação Carmona e Costa, features reproductions of Jorge Martins’ drawings and paintings from 1957 to 2012, alongside original essays by Manuel Castro Caldas, João Fernandes, António Mega Ferreira and Sara Antónia Matos, as well as a letter by Pierre Georgel and excerpts of the artist’s graphic diaries.