By Emma Bertenshaw [email protected]
Escola de Artes in Lagoa is featuring the creative works of local artist Carlos Clemente in an exhibition that runs until today (Friday).
The Algarve Resident visited the exhibition to meet with Carlos.
His striking sculptural pieces are colourful and entirely made of tightly rolled strips of paper from magazines and newspapers.
These have then been glued together to form objects, some of which are abstract geometric structures and others topical, resembling architecture.
The largest sculpture is an almost life-sized dog house with pitched roof. When asked how long it took to build, Carlos shook his head and replied: “Too long. I can’t even say how many hours but it was many days of work!”
Carlos then picked up another piece, resembling a small house featuring a moving front door with some whimsical street lamps.
It was much smaller (roughly 30 x 25 x 30cm in size) and surprisingly light.
“This took about a month to make. It is not easy to see, but they are made up of many multiples of these straws put together.”
He pointed towards some individual rolled straws on a table as an example.
It was while Carlos was recovering at home from an operation over four years ago that he began to experiment with magazines his wife had left for him to read.
Unable to move around much, his hobby turned into a large collection, which now fills one room in the exhibition centre.
All of the pieces are also for sale with small ones starting from around €20.
