A long cultural and symbolic history has made the heart the physical seat of passions. The heart offers itself, steals, is seized, hurts, or exults to the rhythm of feelings. Passions are linked to loving emotions, but also to hatred, anger, and, religiously, to complete devotion, as well as the suffering and death of martyrs and above all of Christ. What unifies such a vast semantic field is the notion of the extreme – excess, the loss of control of reason in the face of the avalanche of emotions. In this exhibition we bring together two art forms that perhaps share the common thread of appealing to the incontinence of feelings and the raw expression of passions: the religious art of the Modern Age, with an emphasis on the Baroque, with works from the collections of churches in the Archdiocese of Évora, and a set of contemporary works of so-called “Art Brut,” mostly made in a therapeutic context, or by artists who almost always began their practice in asylums, all of them loaned by the remarkable collection of Richard Treger and António Saint Silvestre.

Clearly, these are two sets of very different natures, which we organize into four rooms – passion, the heart, suffering, and death. If the artistic practice of the patients was an invitation to the direct expression of their torments and passionate fixations, or if we prefer, to the expulsion of their inner demons (Dr. Charcot, in 1875, called it “the art of the possessed and the demonic”), Christian religious art shows the horrors of hell, the sufferings of the saints, in penance or martyrdom, and the violent passion of Christ, channeling the emotion and meditation of the devotees into the starkness of the representations, in a communication strategy that was also frequently an exercise in appeasing the passions (or the soul) of the believer, in a liberating process that inevitably has threads of communication with artistic practice, whether inside or outside the walls of hospitals.